He held the child out to Skyweaver. But the god of souls only gazed at her newborn with sorrow in her eyes.
She did not take her baby. Instead, she lifted her weaving knife and held it out to Day. “Keep Eris safe. Until I find you.”
Far below, Leandra’s soldiers broke down the tower door. Their footsteps echoed up the stairs.
Skyweaver went to her weaving bench and picked up the spindle there.
“The key to your escape,” she whispered. Taking her servant out into the hall, she drew the spindle across the floor. In its wake, a silver line shimmered delicately on the floorboards. On one side stood the door to her weaving room. On the other . . . a world of mist and starlight.
Day looked from the mist to the god he served.
Skyweaver looked to her daughter, seeing a life she might have had. I could still have it, she thought. She would fight for that life—and for her daughter. She would defeat Leandra just as she defeated the Shadow God.
The soldiers’ footsteps were close now. As their shouts got louder, the baby started to wail.
Skyweaver kissed her daughter’s brow. She tucked the spindle into the blanket swaddling her, then turned to face the enemy on the stairs.
“Come with us,” Day begged.
Skyweaver shook her head. “I must end this,” she said as Leandra appeared before her, as cold and ruthless as the sea. “I will find you when it’s done. Now go!”
With no other choice before him, Day obeyed. Clutching the child in one hand and Skyweaver’s knife in the other, he stepped across the shimmering line and into the mist.
Leaving his god behind.
Forty-Three
Safire woke to a bitter taste in her mouth. She lay on her side, her wrists and ankles bound, her mouth gagged, and her body aching from the constant bumping of a cart’s wheels on rough terrain.
It smelled like fish and brine here. And though the cloth sack over her head blocked out the world, Safire could hear the clop of horse hooves and the softer hush of waves lapping against a wharf.
Axis Harbor, she thought.
Suddenly, the cart jerked to a stop. Someone stood over her. Safire flinched, waiting for whatever was coming. But whoever it was simply untied the rope around her ankles. A heartbeat later, they dragged her from the cart by her armpits and set her on her feet.
Safire would have tried to run, except she couldn’t see. The effect of the scarp berries hadn’t completely worn off yet, making her sluggish and dizzy. She tried to listen, taking in every sensory detail she could.
She heard the clink of money and the murmur of voices as they shoved her up a slope of some kind. As soon as the ground leveled, her boots thumped against wooden planks, and she knew she was on a ship.
The pressure around her throat let up as they untied the sack, then pulled it off her head. Several faces swam into view, none of which were familiar, and then, quite suddenly, she was being shoved down through a hatch and into a dark, dank hold where several people huddled against each other.
Safire rose, shakily, to her feet. Her hands were bound behind her back. She looked up just as the hatch slammed shut, plummeting her into darkness once more.
“Where am I?” she asked.
From the darkness, the deep-throated voice of a man answered, “In the belly of the Angelica.”
That meant nothing to her. “The Angelica?”
“A ship that trades in human cargo.”
“Where is it headed?”
“A far distance from here, lass.”
Safire turned toward the voice. “What do you mean?”
“He means,” said a woman’s voice from farther away, “you’ve been sold by the empress. It’s what she does with petty criminals. Selling them is more profitable than imprisoning them. Or killing them.”
Safire was starting to lose feeling in her hands. The rope binding her wrists was too tight. She breathed in deep, trying to focus. Needing to take stock of the situation.
These were the things she knew: Eris was in terrible danger. Dax and Roa were in the clutches of the empress. Asha would soon be forced to hand over the Skyweaver’s knife. And she herself was trapped on a ship bound for some godsforsaken place she’d never heard of, where her friends would never find her.
A cranking sound thundered around them, and Safire knew from the limited time she’d spent on ships that they were hauling up the anchor. As soon as it was fully raised, they’d head out to sea.
First things first, she thought.
“There’s a knife in my boot,” she spoke into the darkness. “Could someone cut me free?”
Forty-Four
Skye. It was the name carved into her spindle.
“How long have you been in here?” Eris gripped her bars as she stared at the woman in the cage across from her own. Her face and clothes were streaked with dirt and grime.
“Oh, child.” Skye’s tiny frame heaved with a sorrowful sigh. “Years and years.” She tilted her head then, carefully pushing herself to the edge of her cage—so as not to set it spinning. “You look so familiar”—her gaze gently traced Eris—“almost as if—”
“But why did they put you here?”
“Because I defied her.” Skye’s jaw tightened. “She declared me an enemy of the Star Isles and accused me of colluding with the Shadow God. Of creating an abomination—one she would never stop hunting.” Her green eyes narrowed, as if remembering. “They took my hands to punish me.” She lifted the two stumps of her arms. “But they couldn’t take my child. My servant, Day, hid her away.”
Eris’s heart constricted at that name.
“Day?” she whispered. It was Day who made her stay in her room when visitors came to the scrin or sent her up to the scarps to cut plants for dyeing. As if he didn’t want her seen. Swallowing hard, she said, “Day was the name of the man who raised me.”
Skye lowered her arms, staring fiercely now. “What did you say?”
Eris swallowed. “I . . . was abandoned. Day found me on the steps of the scrin and convinced the weavers to take me in.” If the Lumina hadn’t taken the spindle Day gave her, she would have reached into her pocket and shown it to Skye.
Skye leaned closer to the bars of her cage. Her green eyes flickering back and forth as she studied Eris. “The night Leandra turned against me, I gave Day three things to guard with his life.”
Eris ached with a sudden, hungry need. “What did you give him?”
“The knife I used to betray the man I love.”
Eris thought of the knife she’d sold to buy passage aboard a ship.
“A key disguised as a spindle.”
Eris squeezed the bars, thinking of the spindle the soldiers took from her.
“And”—Skye looked up, her gaze sharp as a needle—“my baby girl.”
Eris swallowed.
“Her name was Eris,” whispered Skye. In the stunned silence that followed these words, she said, “It’s also your name, isn’t it?”
Eris stared, frozen, as the pieces locked into place.
She’d been no more than a baby when Day found her on the steps of the scrin, swaddled in a woven blue blanket. Or so he’d told her, years later, when he gave her a knife for cutting scarp thistles and a spindle for spinning wool into thread.