#whaleglass

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 40- Azare

***

He wound through the cramped corridors of the Mistfox, speaking to his Witchhunters, making all ready for what lay ahead.

Cereza's cabin door was open. Her oil lamp still burned, though midnight was fast approaching. Azare paused as the lamplight flashed off something bright, sending prisms skittering over the walls. Cereza stood in her cabin, Valeria's whaleglass sword in her hands. It was far too long for her. She held it two-handed, her knuckles white on the crystal hilt, her eyes wide and teeth clenched as she swung it back and forth, muttering to herself.

She whirled with a soft cry and saw Azare in the doorway. Cereza stumbled, catching herself on the edge of the bunk. "Oh. I- I didn't see you- I was just-"

"That's a little bigger than a knife." Azare nodded at the sword. "Something tells me you're not practicing for a duel in here."

She lowered the sword, and her eyes, hooding her face in shadow. She sat, slowly, on the edge of her bunk. "No. Would you come in?"

Azare ducked under the doorframe and sat opposite her on the cabin's single chair, then moved the lowered swordpoint, carefully, away from his stomach.

"It's beautiful," he said.

Cereza turned the sword over in her hands. Iridescence rippled down its flat. No nicks marred the blade, no signs of age or damage, its blue-white facets lit from within so the cabin seemed darker by contrast, all light stolen into the depths of the crystal.

"May I?" Azare asked.

Cereza offered it to him on the flat of her hands. He took it, hefted it, marveling at its lightness, the warm pulse that filled him as he gripped its hilt, the faint starry reflections it cast over his hands. He traced a bright seam twisting through the blade's core, like a stray current through the deep whale roads, and tasted the bitterness of magic.

The lamplight spat; his pulse throbbed as if in response. I know the taste of you, Severin. As you know the taste of me.

"What do you intend to do with it?" he asked, returning the sword to Cereza.

She leaned it gingerly at the foot of her bunk. "I would rather not do anything with it at all."

"Where we're going, you may not have a choice."

"I know." She lowered her head again, curling her knees to her chest. "How long until we arrive?"

"Few days, given this weather."

"Good. Enough time for me to work out a way to not look like a scared fox kit when Lord Sabat stares me down." She peered up at him. "Are you scared?"

"Of course I am."

"Didn't think you could be."

"I am, regrettably, human."

"So you really aren't able to turn into a giant black fellfox? I was holding out."

"If I could, I would be a great deal more persuasive."

"If there's anything to fear, it's Lord Sabat," Cereza said. "Atana may be Bateleur's daughter and their lady, but it's Sabat they respect. She has her loyal followers, but if he turns, the rest will, too."

"What are you thinking?"

She settled back in her bunk, her ankles crossed, her hands folded over her stomach. Her eyes were bright with focus, sharp as a hawk's.

"I have an idea," she said. "Do you remember Sabat's story? The Korag Magra?"

"The Ork Mother, she of a thousand shards of gibbering darkness, she who birthed crabs and marrow-worms, she who will not be devoured?"

"That's the one. She who comes as a portent of the end-times."

"A difficult tale to forget."

"And one the pirate lords may heed."

Azare tilted his head, looking her in the eyes. "Careful, Princess. These aren't the forgiving sort."

"If you came in here to warn me of all the world's dangers, you can get up and go," Cereza said, her voice hard. "I'm not a child."

"No." Azare leaned back, crossing one knee over the other. "You're not. I'm sorry."

She gave him a prim nod, lacing together her fingers, then unlacing them again. She glanced up at him, her brow furrowed. "May I try something?"

"Such as?"

"Give me your hand."

He extended it to her, and she took it between hers. Cereza's grip was strong, her gray eyes steady as she leveled them on his face.

"Now," she murmured. "Concentrate."

"On what?"

"Give me a memory. Something good."

Azare nodded. "I have it."

"I know." She closed her eyes. The air rippled, a surge like a gathering wave. Again the taste of magic, blood on the backs of Azare's teeth.

Cereza's grip tightened, her fingernails digging into his wrist. Memories rose inside him, and with them, wind. It rushed through the cabin's still air, ruffling his hair. His sharp inhale brought with it the taste of dust, of sand in sunlight, of salt-spray.

Softness tickled his palm. He lifted his free hand and opened it. White petals spilled into the wind: snowbloom, sweet and bitter all at once.

"What do you see?" Cereza asked him.

"Home," he said.

She nodded. "I think I'm beginning to understand," she said. "This connection to all things. Before, it was only in dreams."

"And now?"

"Does it feel real?"

"Yes."

Cereza winced, and the illusion was swept away, nothing but a spurt of firelight as the lantern settled, nothing but the taste of dust and snowbloom lingering on Azare's tongue. Cereza sat, hunched, breathing hard, staring at the floor with eyes glazed. Her hands were tight on Azare's.

He slid them from her grip and took her wrists, gently. Her nails had bitten pale crescents into his skin. "Are you all right?"

She nodded. "I have to be."

The lamp flame spat, its light captured and refracted by the whaleglass sword. It made strange shapes on the cabin walls, impossible patterns, ever-shifting with the ship's sway. Cereza lifted her head. Azare felt it, too- a change in the air, in the timbre of the waves against the ship. A  tension he'd come to recognize.

He was here.

Azare met Cereza's eyes again. "Is it time?" she asked.

"Yes."

She nodded. "Then I'll see you on deck."

Azare left the cabin. Ziva stood in the corridor outside, leaning by the lantern with arms folded. "Girl must be hurting," she said, nodding at Cereza's door. "You have a fair hand with her."

"Making up for lost chances."

Ziva smiled. "Enough of those to fill the seas. You sure about this?"

"Ask me later."

She shrugged. "If we're still breathing. Truth be told, I suspect we'll all be food for the rockfish come daybreak."

"I missed your honesty, Lapin."

"You know us. We're always honest."

"Are we?" Azare asked, quietly.

Her brows drew together, and, as if on reflex, she touched the hilt of her plain knife. Azare studied her, the way the lamplight glistened off her black curls. It touched the curve of her cheekbone and drifted in her eyes, not quite reaching their depths.

He remembered her spitting and snarling in the sand, screaming at him to end it, to kill her. He remembered her as a child covered in dust and blood, sinking to her knees at the feet of kings and gods and burning brighter than either.

"Do you think we ever had a chance?" he said.

"And do you want to know the answer? Sky might rain fire and fleet and all manner of monster, and you need the truth from me?"

"It's all I want."

"Even now?"

"Now, as always. Bellana's mercy, Ziva-"

He breathed her name, and saw the lines around her eyes tighten.

"You remember what I did when my family died?" she said. "The priests were all dead, so I buried them. I dug with my hands, at first. Then with my knife. I hacked out their graves and tipped them in. It took the last of my strength to fill in the holes, so the flies wouldn't get at them. I thought it would kill me, the weight of that dirt. All I could taste was blood. You know what kept me standing?"

"What?"

"Rage," she said. "Someone had to pay. Something had to bleed enough for to make up for what had happened to my family, what had happened to Estara, what would happen again if I didn't do something. Otherwise, what was the bloody point? Someone had to pay. Even a prince. Even a god. Even you."

Her eyes were bright. That look was leagues away, years in the past, watching herself dig in the dirt. "I'm a grave in the desert, Severin. Flies buzzing in the dust."

"No, you aren't. You're Ziva Lapin. Isn't that enough?"

"I don't know. I don't know if it can be, now or ever. I loved you because I thought I could kill the part of you that doubted," Ziva whispered. "If I remembered you like I wanted you to be, as full of hate as me, then it was like I'd won-"

She cut off, and squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands flexed, but she didn't move. She took a sharp breath.

"Why?" she asked.

"What?"

"In our duel of honor." She looked up at him. "Why did you spare me?"

"I know you, Ziva," he told her. "You didn't want to die on your back, spitting sand and curses. If you had, you would have let me do it without a word of protest. You have that fire left in you. I know you do. More than all else, you wanted to live."

She stared up at him. She was so close, enough to make out the tremble of her lashes, enough to see the healing bruises on her face, to hear the faint, taut hiss of her breathing. She was this close before, when she had killed him.

Fast, she turned. Her hair brushed his face, and Azare shuddered; he lowered his head as she moved past him, climbing the ladder to the hatch.

***

Hush lingered on deck, like it had on their approach to Alkona. This time, there was no prisoner to sacrifice. This time, they were on their own.

Azare headed past the Witchhunters at the lines and toward the bow. The open ocean spread before them, waves hissing against the Mistfox's bow as it cut cleanly ahead. They'd left Bellana's Arm sometime before nightfall, heading north, following the lower edge of the Ork Roads, and now the sheltered shores of Lapide were long gone. The moons glowed overhead, the great moon shrunk down to a crescent, like a half-closed eye.

A single cloud gull skimmed the stars. The Leviathan's unnatural snow made them look as if they were falling: a gentle rain of stars across the sea, dissolving as they touched the waves.

"Trim the sails," Azare called, and Guilan at wheel relayed the order. The sails creaked; the Mistfox slowed, waves crashing against its bow. Ziva hung back, resting a hand on the gunwale.

Azare stared out to sea. There was still time to change his mind, to find another way. To run and never look back.

Footsteps came up from behind him, and Alois leaned, wordless, against the railing, a long arm's length away from Azare. He stared like Azare had done, out past the bowsprit, past the faint green reflections of the running lights.

Azare took a slow breath and pushed his hands deep into his pockets. "You don't miss it until you've left it behind."

"What?"

"Land."

Alois smiled. "I like it out here," he said. "Finally, some peace and quiet. Little enough of that where we're going."

Silence fell. Azare listened to the creak of the rigging, the voices of the night crew, the faint chime of a sailor's charm someone had tied to the bowsprit, crab-claws and small silver bells and stones brought all the way from Estara.

Regret welled in him- that he hadn't had the chance to go home, to see those red shores and glorious sunsets, to see the heat-shimmer off Pavaloir, the high fortress walls of the Tower on its crag, like some great rock guardian.

That he'd never gotten to see Daval again.

He wished he'd been the one to kill him. He wished he'd put his hands around Daval's throat and laughed as he throttled the life from him. He wished he could have spoken with Daval, just one more time, the two of them standing together like they'd once stood together. To be with him and find forgiveness. More than anything he wished he'd been there with the man who was once his friend, knelt beside him and held him and stayed with him to the last.

It didn't matter anymore. Daval was gone. Alois mattered now, not the dead.

"I know..." Azare began. "I know you were close to Isabella Valere. I'm sorry."

Alois nodded. "She died with honor," he said quietly.

"Doesn't make it better," Azare told him. Alois glanced up at him, but said nothing.

Silence fell once more.

After a moment Azare shifted, stepping away from the railing. "It's time, Highness," he told Alois.

Cereza had come on deck, ghostly in her fringed cloak, her long, pale hair blowing in the wind. It chilled Azare, full of ice and the chill of distant storms. He stood back from the bow. The Witchhunters made a ragged circle at his back, all battered uniforms and haunted eyes, and standing all the same. A rush of gratitude gripped him.

He caught Ziva's eye. She gave him a nod.

This was no Alkona, no standing stones and ritual ground. Still, the stars were wild, the snow dashed to flurries on the breeze. Azare hoped it was holy enough.

He reached for his belt and drew the bone knife, smooth and pale, its point rusty with blood. Another gust of wind winnowed down, filling the furled sails.

Azare opened his palm to the sky.

"I call you," he whispered.

He brought the point of the knife into his palm, and twisted. Blood filled his palm, running down his wrist to wick his cuff black. The wind kicked the waves to a rush, rocked the whole of the Mistfox. The sea heaved around them. Waves peaked to whitecaps. The snow flurried, glittering like loosed stars.

"Come on," he heard Ziva urge.

It came. From high overhead- a thrum. A spike of pressure.

A wingbeat.

The shape blotted the stars, the snow: a shadow in the wilderness of the night, a form parting the mist. Wind cascaded over the deck as the witch flared its wings, head snaked back, eyes golden. The running lights spat bright blue.

Azare sensed a current of unease flash through his Witchhunters, sensed tightened jaws and tension. Little wonder. Last time they'd faced a witch they'd seen their comrades burned to cinders by her lightning. By his side, Ziva cut them a glare. There were no weapons here. For good or for ill, they'd come on deck unarmed.

The witch settled to the bow, great talons gashing wounds in the railing and bowsprit, wings lifted in twin arcs. His eyes fixed on Azare, pupils narrowed to pinpricks.

Azare lowered his hands and stepped forward. In a shiver of feathers the witch folded his wings, in and in, becoming smaller, twisting down on himself. Down crumbled from his pale limbs, his skinny shoulders. He became a boy again, balanced on the bowsprit, his black toenails digging into its wood.

"You called me," he said.

"You followed me."

The witch-boy grinned, his teeth sharp as a shark's. "What do you want?" He cast a look across the ship, lifting his hands, clenching them to clawed fists. "Your crew drowned? Your pretty ship shattered?"

With each word the wind's strength grew, rising to a gale shriek like knives. "All your bones sunk to the bottom of the sea?"

"I want to make a bargain," Azare said.

The wind died down, as quick as it had come. Snow danced in its wake, and the witch-boy's eyes brightened, twin moons in his pale face. He watched as Azare approached, as he stood before him, still holding the bloody knife.

"I need your help," Azare said. "You're no ordinary creature, are you?"

"There are still those of us who remember who we were before we hungered for the Leviathan's power, the Leviathan's blood," the boy said. "Before cunning Mazarin made a mockery of the Leviathan's gifts, when our power was our own. And I remember, too, what might be moved with it."

"Then I ask for that power."

"You know as well as I do that balance is demanded by the Leviathan. I cannot give without first being given in turn. So I ask you, Severin Azare." A feather of icy wind stroked Azare's cheek. "What will you give me?"

What, indeed.

Last time it was blood, a nameless prisoner's throat sliced and spilled over the stones. A pool of rainwater turned red. The witch chained against his will, his own magic turned against him. And what had he given before? Alois, for Estara. Alois, for all.

How he'd thought he knew the meaning of sacrifice.

And what did he have to give now? His own life? He'd give it if that was what it took, but Azare knew it wasn't enough. To die here, in this lonely, starlit place- that would make him a martyr, a legend of Estara, another to be carved in its King's Hall and revered beyond reason. A nation feigning strength while clinging to its past, even as it bled, even as it cried out to be saved.

He would become its true son, sanctified by sacrifice. He would become what Daval always wanted. Statues in a desert, statues worshipped by the starving.

Oh, Daval. His heart twisted. No. Daval was dead. Daval was gone. His ways were gone, too, and there was no looking back.

What will you give me?

Azare lifted his head.

"I give you my heart," he said, and sank to his knees. "I give you my life in Estara."

He heard Ziva's hiss of an inhale beside him, sensed Alois's eyes on him. He didn't turn, didn't break from the witch's gaze. "If you swear to help me, to carry my ship and my fleet over the seas in pursuit of the Leviathan, I will never set foot on Bellana's ground again. I'll do so on pain of all your wrath. I'll leave its shores, and leave them forever."

The witch's eyes were wide. "You would forsake Estara," he said. "You would do this."

"Yes."

"Then promise me, Captain Azare."

"I promise you," Azare said. Each word tasted sharp in his mouth. "With my blood, with my bones, with all that I am, I swear."

With the rustle of feathers the witch's wings unfurled, as if from the substance of the night. They stirred the air as the boy stepped down from the bowsprit, alighting on the deck. He paced toward Azare, pale feet silent on the planks.

Gently he took Azare's left hand, its palm still bleeding. Azare shivered as the witch uncurled his fingers, as he lifted the wound to his mouth and lapped at the blood, his teeth scraping raw flesh. His pupils swelled, nearly filling his eyes.

A pulse shuddered through the wind, through the deck, through the sea and sky. The stars flared bright as fires.  

The witch-boy raised his head again, mouth smeared with blood. Without warning, his hand shot forward, pressing to Azare's chest, just over his heart.

Azare gasped; cold splintered through him, then heat, then pain. It speared him, white and blinding, and just as fast was gone. Strange colors danced in his eyes. He pitched forward and the boy caught him, keeping him on his knees.

"You promise me," the witch-boy echoed. His mouth brushed Azare's ear. "And may your heart beat once and then no more if this you break."

"Then...then it's done," Azare managed.

"Done," the witch whispered. "And done, and done."

He released him; the backdraft of his wings scattered ice. In one leap he took to the sky. With a wingbeat he transformed and soared aloft. There he circled, small as a seabird. The Mistfox rocked on the unsettled sea.

On his knees, Azare looked down at his palm. The wound had sealed. His blood was dry on the bone knife. He pressed his hand to his heart, feeling in it the pulse of magic, the geas sealing his promise. As if in answer the breeze picked up, hissing through the furled sails, coiling round the masts. The witch-boy had honored his bargain. They'd have their fair winds, enough to drive an armada before them, and with luck, bear them in time.

He thought of Estara, of its red shores, its spires, its plagues and its dust and the haunting song of the wastes. The wind that was a living thing. Gone, and gone forever.

But it was not gone, not for Estara. Only for him. The past was dead. All that mattered now was what to come.

At any cost, he thought. At any sacrifice.

Azare rose, shaking. He faced his crew. "What...what are you shirking for?" he said, searching each set of eyes on him. "You feel those winds, so catch them. We have leagues to sail, so set to."

"You heard the bloody captain," Ziva cried.

She strode ahead, calling orders, the silent deck bursting into movement. At the wheel she paused, and gave him a long look, then faced her crew again.

Azare turned and began away, wincing, the tang of magic heavy in his mouth. He needed the dark. He needed whiskey, if Ziva had left him any.

"Azare. Wait."

He looked back. Alois faced him, his curls ruffled and flecked with snow.

"I..." Alois went on. "I wanted to thank you."

Azare waited. So did Alois, as if collecting his thoughts.

"You helped me back in Valeris," he said. "You told me about Sirin, about the monster. And that helped Luca, and...and Cereza, too."

"You care for her, don't you?"

Alois nodded. He pulled his cloak collar around his face. His brows were furrowed together, his face serious, too serious for a boy his age.

But he wasn't a boy any longer, no more a child, never again. He was the king of Estara, king of the broken country Daval and Enzo Acier, Etain Belmont and Jasque Azare and a thousand other sovereigns had left behind for him to piece back together. It was the legacy Azare had left for him, the only inheritance he had to give. A deadly task, a daunting one, one he desperately wished Alois didn't have to undertake. Still, he knew Alois would never leave it behind. Azare knew, with everything he was, his son would see it through to the end.

"I'm grateful you're here," Alois said. "I...I don't want to be, but I am. I'm glad you're with me. I'm glad you lived."

Azare drew a tight breath. Neither he nor Alois moved. The night was wild around them with snow and with stars.

"I can't forgive you," Alois said at last. "And I don't know if I can-" He drew a short breath. "If I can ever call you my father. But I know how much my mother loved you. She wouldn't have done what she did if she hadn't. I trust that. As Estara's king, I trust you to see this through."

"I won't betray your trust again."

"For all our sakes," Alois said, "I believe you."

He turned and retreated belowdecks. Azare stood alone in the starlight, the bitter taste of magic fading from his tongue.

[thetoots]

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[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 1- The Nameless Girl

***

Val paused, her broom stilling on the black flagstones, and listened to the faint boom of approaching wings.

Aiatar, she thought, drawing a slow breath. Aiatar crossing the sea border. The skies of Rashavir were ever alive with the churn of vast wings, but rarely were there so many at once, displacing the air and sending a spike of pressure through her head with each immense beat.

Down here, deep in the warrens of kitchens and sewers, passageways and slave-quarters, most couldn't hear the goings-on of the Aiatar high overhead. Val could. She always could, ever since she was a child. She was thirteen now, or thereabouts, and it had only become worse the older she grew. When storms were on their way her head ached, a deep pulse in the backs of her teeth. When the queen was conducting rituals she felt that too, and it wasn't pain then, but a place beyond it, a rushing, thrumming surety.

If there was a flight of Aiatar returning, in those numbers, with that much haste, it meant Val was going to feel that rush again, and soon.

It meant the queen was back in Rashavir.

High Queen Mazarin was ever absent from Rashavir, personally overseeing her two lower queens and the isles they held rule over, ensuring the Empire's power and with it her own. Val was beneath notice- grimy, gray-clad, with shorn hair and a permanent slump to her shoulders. Few guards out here on the barrier walls gave her a second look as she swept floors or raked out hearths or polished the storm crystal lamps until their blue-white light shone unimpeded. She liked to listen to them, their tales of sea-beasts vanquished before they could cross the sea borders, lightning gashing great hissing wounds in their glistening hide.

They had plenty of stories about Queen Mazarin, too. Every guard or soldier had a story about how they'd personally seen the queen call a maelstrom to rival the Leviathan's. Every Aiatar in the whole bloody barrier wall was the queen's personal friend, to hear them go on so, but Val didn't dare contradict them. Any slave would find themselves broken and bleeding if they spoke up against one of the Aiatar, and Val more likely so than most. There was a reason she kept her eyes fastened to the floor.

There was nothing wrong with her ears. Being beneath notice could be a powerful thing. She listened. According to the guards, Mazarin didn't just leave to go oversee her Empire. She left to gather whaleglass, to bring it in great raw slabs to Rashavir, to forge it into weapons for the Empire.

It wasn't whaleglass alone she brought to Rashavir. Sometimes slaves were taken. The queen's soldiers came in their sleek black armor, wings churning the air while the overseers kept their charges in line. Many times Val stood shoulder to shoulder with the others her age as the Aiatar examined them, straight-backed and elegant and unblinking before the lines of shivering children. They would gesture, and the overseers would wrest the chosen slave from their ranks, and bring them and the other chosen to the soldiers. Val never saw where they went after that, but she knew.

It was to the tower. It was to Rashavir itself.

"What do you suppose they do with them?" she whispered, once, to the other children. They'd been up late, crouching in the barracks, playing knock-me-down with pieces carved from pebbles and old gull bones, a circle of grubby children lit by flickering candlelight, ears pricked for the coming tap of an overseer's boots. "The ones they take."

"I dunno. Eat them probably." The boy wiped his nose off on his shirt. "Your turn."

Val had flicked her pebble. Bone pieces clattered. She scooped them up, weighing them in her palm. "Maybe they get to live up there," she said quietly. "Maybe they get to be free."

The other kids shrugged, but Val couldn't get the question out of her head. What do they do with them?

What?

What?

She'd bent her head back to the game, but she couldn't focus, and later, couldn't sleep. Don't think about it, she told herself. Don't. That was dangerous, and even more so for someone like her. Time had passed, and the other children grew less kind as they understood the truth of what she was, and answers never came. She would never know what Queen Mazarin did up there, what she wrought with whaleglass and slaves.

Mazarin been gone a long time; Val wasn't sure how long, but even she could tell this was no simple tour of the Triune Seas nor uprising quashed. If she was back, Mazarin had returned with whaleglass.

Whaleglass.

Val looked up, the whisking echoes of her broom fanning through the still, frigid air. Her breath plumed as she exhaled. The hall arched around her, a vast vault of shadow. Before her rose the Sentinel. This was a spare; the active Sentinels crouched atop the barrier wall, facing the ocean, vast horned heads lifted against the sleet. They hummed, too, a deep and pulsing vibration Val felt in her bones like a coming storm.

Even in disuse, this one was mighty: a great winged beast, twin pairs of wings folded down its back, taloned feet and beaked head furred with a fine layer of dust, all carved from reflective black stone. An ornate collar had been sculpted round its neck, forming a V over its powerful chest. A socket gaped in the V, a round empty hole in its chest, big enough for Val to climb and curl up in.

A faint residue lingered in the socket. It shone the prismatic glister of oil on water, of starlight on silver.

Whaleglass. Its heart was whaleglass, and it was what gave it and its cousins life, what gave Rashavir life, the pulsing blood of Aiatar power. They held whaleglass, and with it, magic.

Val's fingers tightened on the broom handle. She was supposed to clean the Sentinel's chamber, keep the dust down, but she couldn't make herself move. She lowered her broom and stepped toward the Sentinel. In its black stone flank she saw her own diffuse reflection, her own wide eyes.

She reached out. She felt it, then- a spark, a jump. Her heart pounded, but her breathing stilled, the silence at once a watchful thing, presence and not absence. The pain in her head hadn't abated; she pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. She caught a glimpse of herself in the Sentinel's flank and fear twisted her guts.

"Stop," she whispered, to herself, to the pain, to the thing inside her, deadly and damning. "Stop it."

But she could not look away. She could not lower her hand. Her fingertips hovered over the black stone.

"What's wrong, vala? Having your nightmares again?"

Val let out her breath. She counted to five, then lowered her hand.

The others surrounded her. Her head hurt so bad she hadn't heard them coming, but they were there nevertheless, crouching at the top of the steps, leaning against the walls. Each wore gray, like her. Unlike her, each was human: half a dozen children. All of them stared. The boy who'd spoken was maybe a year older, but the rest were younger, kitchen slaves or chambermaids to the soldiers posted on the seawalls.

Val flinched, huddling over her broom again. She was smartest not saying a word.

"Maybe she can't talk," said another child, a girl with dark curls. "I heard sometimes her sort come out wrong. No hands or feet, or no skin, or their backs crooked. Maybe she came out with no voice."

"I've heard her talk," said another.

"I heard her cry out in the night," said the first boy. "In the barracks. Whimpers and screams. Please, please, please. What can you have to beg for, vala?"

He spat the word like a curse. Val lifted her eyes, looking up at the boy through her ragged fringe. It may well have been a curse, coming from the boy's lips. He shared Val's brown skin and colorless hair, but his eyes were brown, too, unmistakably human. Val hadn't seen a mirror for weeks, had only caught glimpses of herself in water or in the reflective black stone of the walls, but she didn't need to get a look at her face to know why the other children stared at her with such searing disgust. It was a truth that would never go away, not unless she blinded herself, not unless she carved out her own eyes.

They were golden, same as those of the Aiatar, a damning, unmistakable mark of her mongrel blood. They were why the boy used the word he did, why Val had no proper name, why she worked down here in the dark and the dust.

Vala wasn't a name. In Aiata, it meant mongrel.

"I said," the boy repeated, "What can you have to beg for?"

"You to go away," Val muttered.

"What was that?"

Val shook her head. Each child carried something, she noticed. Wooden spoons. Brooms. One girl even had an oyster knife, a short spike of steel held between her fingers. The ache in her head had been replaced by cold terror.

Quiet, she urged herself. Just shut up. She tried to keep sweeping, but her hands shook on the broom.

The girl tugged at Val's hair. "This bit looks human enough. Like your mother, right? Who was she, anyway? Some chamber-slave?"

"I don't know," Val whispered.

"What was that?"

"I said I don't know," Val repeated, more loudly. She looked up again. "I never knew her."

That was half a lie. She had memories, but they were few, and not enough. Flickering, fleeting. A glimpse of light, as if a candle flame played across some distant wall. Warm arms, a dry whisper. A kiss pressed to her cheek. The tacky cold of drying blood. A cradle song, singing her to sleep. She wasn't even sure if it was real. She was a mongrel, and a slave. She'd come nameless, and nameless she'd remain.

The Aiatar were no stranger to humans; they bore them no ill will. They kept them, cared for them. They loved them. Val had seen countless high-ranking Aiatar with their human consorts, and none of them looked like slaves, dressed in sapsilk and fur, marked with deep blue tattoos and ornamented in silver, so each seemed swathed in moonslight. Some even wore whaleglass, prismatic crystal like trapped starlight, carrying inside it vast power.

The power of the Great Leviathan, Val knew, though she didn't really understand what that meant. All she understood was that there were the powerful, and then there was people like her. Might as well try to pluck the stars as bridge the gap between the two.

She was Aiatar. Half, anyway. Mixing their blood was like rubbing dirt on whaleglass. Not that humans were dirt, exactly. Their influence merely diluted the magic that was air and breath to the Aiatar, muddied it, rendered it base. It was that half that mattered, where Val was concerned. Many times she'd fancied her mother was consort to some Aiatar storm-master, or a hunter, tasked with the lofty goal of obtaining more whaleglass for his empire. Many times she'd imagined her mother arrayed in furs and silver, glowing like the triplet moons, as beautiful as any Aiatar queen. More than likely she'd been hurt by one and cast aside when he was done with her.

Consorts were protected, beloved. Slaves weren't so lucky.

"Careful." The youngest boy's eyes shone in the lamplight, reflecting its blue-white radiance. Trapped lightning, according to what Val had overheard. "She might have magic, and make your eyes squirt blood, or-"

"Magic," the curly-haired girl snorted. "Vala don't have magic."

She pushed Val. Val stumbled again, harder, nearly falling. "See?" the girl went on. "Nothing." She gave Val another shove, hard enough she lost her balance and collapsed to the cold flagstones. Her palms slapped the floor and smarted; tears ran hot down her face. Nausea churned in her stomach; her head seemed ready to crack.

Stop it, stop it, stop it-

She seized her hair in both hands and doubled over, rocking back and forth, salty tears thick in her mouth.

"Go away," she said. "Go away-"

"Or what?" A kick thudded into her side. She yelped. "You'll make blood come out my eyes? Maybe it should come out yours."

She glimpsed the spark of light off a blade. "Maybe we should cut out your eyes. Might be better for you in the long run, what do you-"

"I said go away!" Val's voice rose to a shriek, and so did the pain, a white slash inside her skull. Power rippled as blue light flared and lit the chamber, bright as day, bright as a lightning strike. Val's ears popped. Her eyes sprang open as the other girl screamed, as she was flung bodily off her feet and hurled as if by some massive blow, spinning through the air. She hit the Sentinel's flank, hard. Her head struck with a wet crack, and she crumpled, sobbing, to her hands and knees, kneeling like some ritual offering before the great stone beast.

Val scrambled back, scuttling into the corner, dragging her broom with her. "What did you do?" The first boy's hands curled into fists, his pose tense. The girl kept crying, horrible wracking sobs. Blood matted her hair, glistening on the wall behind her. "What did you do to her?"

"I don't- I don't know-" Val tasted blood in her mouth, bitter as the burst of power. Not just power. Magic. She'd tasted it before; sometimes the air was so thick with it she could barely breathe. Rituals. Searching. Deeper, deeper. Her dreams were full of songs that shuddered from black sea depths, and through them cruised something vast, something unknowable. Please, leave me alone. Lightning crackled through her nerves.

She sprang to her feet, shoving aside the other children. They got out of the way. She skidded up the steps, hurling herself down dark corridors. She didn't know where she was going; anywhere, anywhere but there. The bitter taste lingered in her mouth. It clung to her.

She swung round a corner and straight into a wall; her palms smacked slick stone. Breathing hard, she looked up. She'd run into a doorway, an arch in the stone. A fresh sob blurred her vision, and now the bitter taste was tears. The doorway was sealed; black stone filled the archway. Only Aiatar could open it. Only magic could.

I have magic, Val thought.

She blinked, then pressed her palms harder to the stone. She felt the reverberation of the waves, the ache of cold, and something else. Deeper. Inside the stone. Inside the wall, and further. A pulse, vast and slow and sleeping.

Deeper-

Light sparked behind her eyes. A prism in the sun.

More, and more-

There was a cracking, a grinding, and Val stumbled back. A seam appeared down the middle of the archway, and the door slid open.

Light, blinding after the darkness. Ice wind hit her like a blow; she shuddered, curling in on herself, holding a hand up against the light. Through the doorway was a long walk of icy stone. On one side the walk fell into a sheer cliff, spray leaping and crashing at its distant feet. Aiatar didn't need railings. The sea stretched to the horizon, a heaving expanse of iron-gray swells seamed with whitecaps. Veils of snow hung on the wind, and the stone under Val's feet was brittle with layers of crusted ice.

She shivered, teeth clenched, gripping herself and blinking in the light. The sun burned, a pale circle behind low-hanging clouds. There was no feeling in her feet anymore, but she didn't make a move to go back inside. She stared at the sea, then looked up, past the great bastion wall jagged as the cliff and guarded by Sentinels, past the gusting snow, her gaze climbing, her lips parted in awe.

Overhead loomed Rashavir itself- not just the sea-bordered barrier wall she stood on now, but the fortress, the halls of higher thought, the High Queen's tower, all, a vast spire of black rock standing like a monolith against the storm. Rashavir was the heart of the empire, the stronghold of Aiatar power. Snow flurried around it, like stars torn down and cast to the winds.

Winged shapes tilted and spun in lazy spirals: Aiatar in their monstrous bird forms, rendered tiny as gulls by the sheer scale of the spire. Five hundred feet, a thousand- she didn't know its height, that it was unnatural, it was magic, it had to be. Just like the trapped lightning inside the lamps was magic, just like the bitter taste of power on her tongue was magic.

She'd thrown that girl against the wall. She'd set her power free.

What had she done? What in earth and sky had she done? She'd never let it out like that. She'd never lost her grip. Vala don't have magic. They didn't. They didn't. They never did. They couldn't. It wasn't allowed.

What happens to them if they do?

It was her oldest question, the one she'd asked when she was too little to understand why it was dangerous to wonder.

What would have happened to me if they'd seen?

If they'd known?

If they'd-

A shout echoed up the steps, up from the tunnels. Fear splintered to panic. Val ran again, not blindly like before. Her heart knocked against her ribs, cold burning her throat as she gasped for breath. She stumbled down icy steps, past statues of many-eyed, many-winged monsters dusted with snow, past endless cliffs and the heaving sea. All the while the spire loomed overhead, jutting from the snow-mist like a monster from a cradle song. The queen was back. She was back, and Val had lost control.

What would have happened to me?

Val's stomach churned; her legs gave out. She fell against a statue. She barely felt her feet anymore; her face felt wooden. She couldn't stay here. She couldn't go back, either.

Val looked at the sea again, the crashing waves. Far out, past the islets jutting from the swells, spray burst into the air- the spume of some great sea-beast venting its lungs. The weak sunlight played off its hide, the long ridge of bone winding down its back. A great thing, and terrible. It dived again, and was gone.

Her breathing slowed. Her hand left the flank of the statue. She stepped toward it, toward the sea, toward the edge.

"What are you doing?"

Val froze. She whirled; her heart pounded again, blood flushing through her frozen veins. She stumbled, slipping; one foot skidded off the edge, into empty air. Her stomach swooped, and she clawed out, but there was nothing to hold onto-

A hand closed around her wrist.

Val jerked back, but the hand held her tight- a girl's hand, pale as the snow, and clawed with short, hooked black talons. They dug into Val's wrist, hard enough to puncture her skin. Blood welled, but Val didn't feel it. Her eyes traveled up the girl's arm- banded in engraved silver- and to her face. Moonslight-pale, wide forehead tapering to a pointed chin, small mouth with lips parted, showing the points of her teeth. She didn't look any older than Val.

Stupid, Val told herself. She might be decades older, centuries. Her black hair fell nearly to her hips, bound back from her face with ornate braids and more strange silver ornaments.

Her eyes-

They were golden as a hawk's.

Aiatar.

"You could have fallen," the girl said. She gently pulled Val back to safe ground. Her voice was high and silvery, her accent lyrical. She wore blue sapsilk with thick white fur ruffed about her shoulders, a heavy silver collar at her throat. She might have looked weighed down by all the fur and silver, but she didn't; she stood nearly a head taller than Val, straight-spined and steady. "That would have hurt. It's a hundred feet down to the waves."

"I...I'm..." Val remembered herself and bent her head, her shoulders shaking. "I'm sorry, I-"

"Why are you sorry? You should be happy you aren't dead."

"I'm not supposed to leave the tunnels. I..." I shouldn't even be speaking to you, she thought.

"By the great whale," the girl whispered. "It's you."

Val looked up. The girl stared down at her with wide eyes. "It's you," she repeated. "I thought I felt a flare of magic down here. I thought..."

Her hand crept to the silver collar at her neck. In it was set a shard of crystal, raw and unpolished. The weak sunlight caught it in glints and shards, flaring color from its facets: not just greens and blues, but flame-red and gold.

Whaleglass.

"Here," she said suddenly, and unhooked the collar. She thrust it toward Val. "Hold it."

Val blinked, then reached for the collar, its heavy silver tarnished in the etched lines, still warm from the girl's neck. She touched the whaleglass shard, forgetting the cold, forgetting her fear. It fluttered against her fingertips, like a tiny heart. Stars seemed caught in the crystal, and she felt she was not looking at it, but into it, down and down into unfathomable depths.

A pang rippled through her. As if in answer, the whaleglass pulsed. Not a pulse: a call, a cry, a deep vibrating strain of song played in her nerves, in her heart, in the matter of the world. The wind lifted her hair, the snow swirling around her and the Aiatar girl in a diffuse column, and for a moment Val felt a rush of power, bright and sure.

She let out her breath and lifted her eyes to the other girl's. The same color, she realized. Both of them the same.

"What's your name?" the girl asked, after a long pause.

Val found her voice. "Are you going to kill me?"

The girl laughed. "Of course not. I'm not my mother. Let's start that all over. My name is Tuija."

Val dropped to her knees, her face hot. "Forgive me-"

"Don't. Please don't." The girl gathered Val's hands and pulled her again to her feet. The unreality of it struck Val like a slap: Tuija, princess of Rashavir, daughter of not just an Aiatar queen but of the Aiatar high queen Mazarin, empress of the Triune Seas, commander of magic and keeper of the Whaleglass Vaults herself. Val didn't understand what half of that meant, but from the way the guards and masters spoke of them, and of Queen Mazarin, she knew it had to be important. "Listen. I'm not going to tell. I think-"

She cut off at once. "Please. All I want to know is your name."

Val licked her cracked lips. She tasted blood. "I don't have one," she said.

"What? How can you not?"

"I'm...I'm vala."

"Well, I'll have to find something better than that. What about-"

"No," Val said. Tuija's eyebrows flicked toward her forehead. "No. I...that's what I am. It's all I've got."

"Princess! Princess Tuija!"

The voice echoed from aloft. Tuija's eyes flicked skyward. "Quick," she hissed, and grabbed Val's arm, dragging her up the steps. "My nursemaid can't find me here."

"Nursemaid?"

She waved her hand. "My guard. Whatever. He's a bore. He wants me to go and greet my mother. She's come back, you know, and I- I don't like..."

She shook her head. "It doesn't matter."

"Why wouldn't you want to go to the queen?"

A scream split the wind: the cry of a vast bird, echoing off the waves. Tuija shoved Val against the wall and slashed her hand through the air, leaving a trail of silver light in its wake.

"Hush," she whispered. "He won't be able to see us if you keep quiet."

A shadow fell over the steps. Val looked up as a vast winged shape parted the sleet, wings churning the snow to flurries. An Aiatar, in bird form. He let out another cry, then wheeled on one wing and swooped higher, climbing fast, becoming a ragged shape in the clouds.

"You want what?" Tuija asked Val, turning her head to stare straight down at her.

Val met her gaze. Heat flooded her cheeks, but she didn't look away.

"I want to meet the queen," she said. A flare lit her. She wanted, foolhardy and dangerous, she wanted. Her voice came out hard, came out strong. "To...to see what goes on up there. See the magic. The rituals. The whaleglass-"

"You want to see her forge a new artifact?" Tuija's pupils had shrunk to pinpricks, her golden stare unblinking. She lifted Val's hand. She still held Tuija's silver collar with its chunk of whaleglass. "You want to see how she makes...makes...these?"

"Yes."

At last Tuija blinked. A pang passed through Val. That was fear in her eyes, true fear, bright and haunting, an intensity Val had never seen before in an Aiatar. What reason would one of them, much less their princess, have to be afraid?

She took back the collar and fastened it around her neck, smoothing it in place. "Come on, then," she said.

Snow scattered. Val flinched back, shielding her eyes as darkness expanded from Tuija's back. No, not darkness. Wings. They arched, fanning wide, black feathers flecked with snow, twenty feet of them reaching for the wind. Tuija held out her hands. "Catch on."

"What?"

"You can't fly, can you? Catch on." She smiled, showing again her pointed teeth, and Val's face grew warm again. "Don't you trust me?"

Val let out her breath, then grabbed on tight.

Tuija swung her into her arms; Val yelped, the sound cut off as Tuija sprang into the sky. Those wings opened; the backdraft sucked Val's hair in and released it in a lashing halo round her head. Tuija drove her wings down and they spiraled into the air. Clouds whipped past, colder even than the air below. black rock rushed past, Sentinels and snow, and then nothing, nothing but howling wind and ice fragments sharp enough to bring tears to Val's eyes. She squeezed them shut, then opened them, and looked down.

The world spun. Below, she saw the black crescent of the barrier wall, the Sentinels crouched atop it, facing the ocean. More barrier walls became visible, arrayed in rings around Rashavir's central spire. Cloud scattered across the city, and her vision splintered, icy tears streaming down her cheeks. How many girls like her swept dusty floors? How many here, how many across the Empire?

Tuija spun, swooping toward the spire. Black walls rushed past, scraped to a blur, as they shot toward its pinnacle; smaller spires whipped past them, spear-points crowning their upper heights, gargoyles snarling from battlements. The spire's peak was a single dagger spike of black stone, crowned not in a point but in a single massive piece of whaleglass enclosed in a black-rock cage. The whaleglass hung within the cage, suspended in midair, light beaming through it like a prism and filling the clouds with unearthly radiance.

Its presence ached in Val's jaw, a hole in reality, a warp of power so strong it hurt. Val wanted to get a closer look, but Tuija wasn't headed for the spire's pinnacle. She half-furled her wings, slicing through an archway gaping in the spire's wall and into the arcade beyond.

Tuija let Val go. She collapsed, stumbling against a pillar and holding on. The wind sucked at her, as if it might be strong enough to fling her back out into empty sky.

Tuija folded her wings, and they collapsed in on themselves, vanishing back into her body and leaving tufts of black down behind.

"How..." Val panted. She reached out with a quivering hand. "How do they...do that?"

"What?"

"Your wings." She reached for Tuija's back, brushing away a tuft of down. It stained her fingers like ash. Val traced the line of her shoulderblade, the unmarked skin. Val looked up, into Tuija's eyes. The other girl watched her, a slight furrow between her brows.

"They're a part of me," Tuija said. Her voice was quiet, but there was something in it, something else. Surprise, maybe.

"They're beautiful," Val said.

Tuija blinked, then smiled.

"Come on. Hurry up." She grabbed Val's arm. "She'll be starting soon, and I don't want my nursemaid finding me with you."

Lightning lit the arcade, a flare of white; a bolt scarred the sky. Val gasped, and Tuija went paler. She clutched her whaleglass collar.

"Come on," she said again. "This way."

They threaded through arched hallways. Statues stood down the halls, vast carved panels stretching down each wall. Aiatar quelling sea-beasts, Aiatar resplendent, hands cupping stars, constellations etched in glistening black stone. Armies of Aiatar, drowning islands under the onslaught of captured storms.

Humans, kneeling at the feet of victorious Aiatar.

Humans, chained at the neck, at the arm and ankle.

They wound down spiral steps, down levels. Through arched doorways Val caught glimpses of rooms, of halls. In one, the skeletons of fantastic beasts hung from the ceiling, vast crested birds and platefish huge enough to swallow Val whole. A monstrous skull was mounted on one wall, its jaws agape, its tusks carved with arcane symbols.

Val pointed. "What's that?"

Tuija glanced at it. "Sea-ork."

"I didn't know there was beasties like that in all the world," Val murmured.

In another hall were shelves upon shelves of devices, silver and jet, gold and abalone and pearl, balanced end on end so they seemed to drift weightless in their settings. There were rows of seedlings under storm crystal lamps. Shards of whaleglass strewn carelessly across blue velvet. Arrays of lenses, feathers shifting color moment to moment, grand books open to inscrutable diagrams.

In every hall were humans. Sweeping ashes, polishing instruments, clearing out black down from where it drifted in corners. There uniforms were blue, not gray, but Val recognized the look in their eyes, the way they stared at the floor as they worked.

"There are slaves here, too?" she whispered.

"What? Yes."

"I thought-" Val cut off, but her thoughts churned. I thought all of us in Rashavir were consorts. Friends. Beloved.

"Over here." Tuija hurried to a balcony- a mezzanine, overlooking not the outside of the spire but a plunging central well, its heights open to the sky. Open to the whaleglass beacon, Val realized. Its light speared down and filled the air with its colors, flame-red and gold, green and violet and astral blue. Motes drifted in it, like stars. It touched the walls, sheer plunges of unworked rock, juts and crags sharp as blades.

Below spread the hall itself, a circular courtyard bordered by archways looking out into the storm. The floor was a deep, reflective blue, rippling with brighter iridescence and set with the firmament, creatures taking the place of constellations- a sea-ork impaled with blades, a great flaming bird, a horned beast with a mane of quills. In the middle, a raised dais stood empty.

The rest was filled with Aiatar. Not just Aiatar- humans dotted the crowd, easily identified by their shorter statures and broader builds. Val leaned over the railing as much as she dared, trying to get a better look. They held the arms of Aiatar companions, laughed and sipped from silver cups and smiled, ornamented and dressed in sapsilk, just as she'd imagined. Their faces were clean, their arms etched with tattoos, the same as many of the Aiatar.

Val stared, her eyes warm, her knuckles white on the railing. On reflex, she searched the crowd for her mother's face. Arrayed in silver, glowing like the triplet moons. She was not there, as she'd known she would not be there.

"Do they love them?" she whispered.

"What?"

"Their humans," Val said. "Do they love them?"

Tuija never had a chance to answer. Wingbeats boomed; a shadow rippled between the outer archways. An Aiatar swooped between them, in bird form: immense, its neck an elegant s-curve, its long, hook-beaked head crowned in a ruff of black feathers. It began to shift before its talons met the floor, folding in on itself, feathers becoming sapsilk and white furs and armor and snapping black hair. A woman dropped to the floor, bare feet pale against blue stone, her head held high, her clawed hands outstretched to her court.

Val didn't need Tuija to tell her who she was- she felt the power rolling off her even before she saw the chunk of unworked whaleglass in her hands. Queen Mazarin. She wore white on white, her beautiful face spattered with old scars, her arms banded in silver and ink. A crown rested on her black braids: a whaleglass circlet, pinned in place with spikes like horns.

Tuija sucked in a breath, but Val couldn't take her eyes off the queen, off the parting crowd, off the human brought forth, chained between a pair of Aiatar soldiers in black armor.

"My friends." The queen's voice rang through the heights as she made her way to the dais. "I return to Rashavir with a great gift. The greatest harvest for many decades."

She ascended the dais and lifted her chunk of whaleglass: a pure, translucent oval of it, so huge and so dense Val could see the flutter of the queen's muscles in her arms as she held it high. The light struck it, flaring shards of iridescence and bathing the hall in its radiance.

"The Leviathan takes away," the queen called. "But it gives, too, in return. Its cycle of rebirth has begun a strong one. May this prophesy an empire to last ten thousand years."

The soldiers pushed the human up the dais, pushed her to her knees. Val's hands tightened into fists- with her pale hair, her darker skin, she could only be another slave.

"Is this where they're taken?" she whispered. "The slaves the soldiers come for-"

"Stay down!"

The slave lifted her head. Tears streaked her face. The queen glanced down at her- not with hate, nor disgust, but with nothing. The slave wasn't alive to her, wasn't a person. She was a thing, that was all, and she had one purpose alone.

"Tuija, we have to-" Val half-rose. Tuija jerked her back. Val's wail was caught in her throat. All she could do was stare.

The queen lifted her hand, and her fingertips curved into black talons.

One slash ripped out the girl's throat. Blood spattered the blue floor, the map of the firmament, gouting in heartbeat pulses from the girl's ruined throat; she choked, spasming, spine snapping stiff as the Aiatar holding her let her go. She pitched forward. The bloodspray carved an arc across the dais, across the white sapsilk and fur of the queen's clothes, across her face, still and cold as a mask. It bathed the chunk of whaleglass, marring its iridescent surface.

Mazarin gave a cry, harsh and raw as the voice of her bird form, and thrust the whaleglass aloft. The sky lit white; a bolt of lightning struck the beacon high overhead, then seared down, a vein of pure power, blue-white and crackling with heat. It hit the bloody whaleglass in the queen's hands, turning it to light. Mazarin shook; the light wreathed her, it surrounded her, and it seemed to Val it was inside her too, like she was tearing into it, like she was gorging on it, light and blood and power and all.

As fast, the lightning was gone, leaving nothing but the smell of storms and bitter magic. Rain doused the queen: snow, melted by the heat. She stood in its fall, breathing hard, her eyes alight, the whaleglass steaming and smoking in her hands. It was no longer an oval; it had changed, transmuting into the shape of a massive sword, magnificent and terrible all at once.

"A fine weapon, indeed," she said.

Val backed away from the railing. Tuija's eyes followed her. "Where are you going?"

"That's what they do," Val whispered. All those slaves, all those years. Not just here. All across the barrier walls, all across Rashavir, all across the whole vast span of the Empire. How many had died? How many open throats had fed the queen's whaleglass weapons? Magic stung her lips, stung her eyes; she was crying, and tasted the salt on her tongue.

Had her mother died that way?

Had she died for the queen's power?

"The ones like me," she whispered. "The vala born with...with magic. Where do they go if they're found out?"

Tuija looked down.

"Where do they go?" Val cried.

"They kill them," Tuija said. "At birth, they kill them."

Val looked down: down, and down, to the barely-visible crescent of the barrier wall. She could just glimpse the form of a Sentinel down there, crouched on the battlements, staring out to sea. They came alive at an Aiatar commander's touch, to raze sea-beasts with blue fire, to turn skies and sea alike to baths of flame.

She looked back to Tuija. There was fear in the other girl's eyes. The same fear as the children below, with their knives and their taunts. Her own fear.

No, she thought. This isn't the way it should be.

"Take me down," Val said. She scraped the tears off her face with the heel of her hand. "Take me to one of the Sentinels."

"What?" The fear in Tuija's eyes became alarm. "No. No, you can't. That takes an Aiatar. That takes magic-"

Val stepped close, hands tightening to fists. "I have magic."

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 43- Ziva

***

Wind tugged at Ziva's curls as she stood at the Mistfox's bow, hand on the railing. She lifted her face to the sky with eyes narrowed. That had been a fell wind, full of ice and ill intent, setting the sailor's charms to ringing. The witch's wind, she knew, but she couldn't help the stirrings of superstition it brought on.

No fair portent, she thought. Then again, when as of late was there?

She watched the dark silhouette of the islands grow nearer. Dawn had just broken, staining the waves crimson and orange. The sun was a pale slash at the horizon, illuminating the barren crags of the approaching land. Even at this distance Ziva heard the boom and echo of waves through their sea caves, the chitter and cry of coursing seabirds. Desolate ground, but neutral ground, no civilization to speak of but the remnants of some long-abandoned fortress clinging to the upper crags, empty of lanterns and inhabited only by wind and gulls.

Above, the witch-boy circled low and alit on the rigging. Ziva glanced up. He'd taken on his human form, skinny and ragged. He grinned down at her from the crow's nest, and Ziva felt cold wind whisk her hair.

"Unnatural," she muttered.

His grin widened.

Ziva heard low voices behind her and looked back. A single lamp shone from a dinghy, already being lowered overboard. Cereza stood at the gunwale, Azare and Alois alongside her. The princess was cloaked, her face pale under her hood, and she wore no weapons save for that improbable whaleglass sword. It hung belted at her side, her hand poised at its hilt. Ziva watched as two crewmen hoisted buckets down, into the dinghy- iron-banded and reeking with blood. Already seabirds, groaks and carrion eyethieves, had scented the blood and circled above. The buckets were heaped with chum, fresh and dripping.

"You're certain?" Azare said quietly.

"Completely," Cereza said. "If you're certain of your watchmen."

"Sighted a pod of them on our way," Ziva cut in, ambling toward them. "Looked to be half-a-dozen good-sized sea-orks, calves, maybe even a bull in the mix. I'd be surprised if they didn't scent this lot already."

She nodded at the chum. Cereza gave it a glance. She was doing a good job at looking calm, but her lower lip trembled, her brow creased with fear.

"Good," Cereza said. "I...I suppose I'd best get a move on."

She looked to Azare.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For not saying I don't have to do this."

"The time for doubting you is long past," Azare told her. He held out his hand, and Cereza clasped it for a moment. "Calm seas, Princess."

"And fair skies."

"Be careful," Alois said quietly. Cereza caught him up in a long hug; it was a while before she let him go. She glanced at Ziva, then with a little nod to herself she hooked one sandaled foot over the railing and clambered down the rope ladder, into the dinghy.

Ziva drew alongside Azare and Alois, the three of them watching Cereza as she fumbled with the oars. At last she slotted them into their oarlocks and began to row, falling into a steady one-two stroke and quickly retreating from the Mistfox's side. After a few minutes her lantern was a pinpoint against the dark waves. Soon, it was lost altogether.

"I'd best get belowdecks," Alois said, his eyes lingering on the place Cereza had been. "You be careful too. The both of you."

Ziva nodded. Head lowered, Alois brushed past her and retreated through the stateroom doors. He'd spoken little to her; Ziva wasn't surprised, but she was unsettled by his lack of vengefulness. If she'd been sentenced to death, forced to share a ship with her would-be condemners, she didn't think she'd be so forgiving.

She set her eyes again on the waves, thinking of Cereza. "Seems a dangerous gamble, Severin."

"Hasn't this all been?"

He was looking at her; she could tell. She felt his gaze like physical touch. She didn't meet it. "Never thought I'd be aflutter over the well-being of a bloody Valere whelp," she muttered. "Never thought I'd break my sacred vows more times than I can count."

"How does it feel?"

"I could use a drink."

Azare smiled. "Time for that later, Lapin. We all need our heads clear. Is that pistol of yours loaded?"

"Could use another check."

"Then do it." He brushed past her as he strode for the ship's wheel. "And be ready."

"I always am, sir."

She turned as he went, words snagging on her tongue. She stared after him as he called orders to draw closer, to lay the anchor some quarter-mile or so off the coast, at the shores of an islet broken off from the island's main bulk. It was there they and the pirate lords would meet- and there Ziva and the rest would bleed their last if all went awry.

Her throat ached. She needed to tell him- what? That she couldn't lose him again? That she couldn't love him the way she wished she could love him? To save himself, and her, and damn the consequences?

She didn't speak. The moment passed; the words died.

Time for that later, Lapin, she told herself.

***

They moored the Mistfox and took the longboat in. As they pulled away, Ziva looked back at the ship. A tick of fear feathered in her throat.

"What?" Alois said.

"Nothing." She glanced at him. "Highness." "You don't like calling me that?" he asked dryly. Ziva blinked. The Alois Belmont she'd watched grow up had never had the guts to confront her, would have taken disrespect with head bowed.

"No," she said, and it was she who sounded dry, now.

"You were following orders, Lapin. We all were. I can't hold a grudge forever, not when Estara is at stake."

"I think you could manage it, Highness," Lapin told him.

Alois let out a short laugh. "Cheeky, Lapin. I respect that. One matter I want to make clear, before today's negotiations begin." "Yes?"

"Never try to betray me again," Alois told her.

Ziva grinned, sudden and hard, and nodded, and they lapsed into silence again, shoulder to shoulder in the Mistfox's longboat. It was something strange indeed, she thought, to support a bastard's claim as heir to the Estaran throne, and an afflicted one at that. But if Estara was to survive, it couldn't do so with a child king.

It was Alois Belmont she'd put her faith in now.

They reached the shore. Ziva's boots crunched on the dry, stony soil as she strode from the surf and onto the islet, flanked by Azare, Prince Alois, the witch-boy, and several of their Witchhunters. Bright blue lizards scuttled into their burrows at their approach and watched with mercury eyes, tongues aflicker. Crumbling walls and broken foundations rose around them as they climbed into the ruins of what must have once been a watchtower or smugglers' nest, barely hanging onto the little islet with each devouring wash of the tide.

They came to a halt on the remains of an ornate floor tiled in cobalt and deep red, now riven with cracks and scattered with sand. From here Ziva could see over the waves, toward the horizon and the rising sun. The groaks and eyethieves had not yet retreated, as if anticipating a feast.

Away with you, little prophets, Ziva thought, casting their whirling shadows a glare. We don't need more bad fortune today.

Dawn came, and with it: ships.

Sails appeared on the horizon. One, then more, then many: a forest of sails snapping a dozen colors in the wind. Flags flew high, pirate banners hung proud from each mast.

"A warning," Ziva said. "They're ready for a fight, each one. Those are war colors and no mistake."

"Steady, Lapin."

"You're sure you trust the girl?"

"Like I trust you."

Ziva snorted. "Not sure that answers my question."

"Don't be scared," the witch-boy murmured at her side. "Worse things in this world than death."

"No worse things today," Ziva shot back, and the boy hummed a little, a smile twitching at his mouth.

Most of the vessels hung back, ringing the islands, but five broke off from the rest and approached, coursing swiftly over the waves.

"Saints," Ziva muttered to Azare. At her side, Alois shifted back and forth on the loose scree, his brow furrowed. "That's not a ship, is it?"

"That," Azare said, "is Lord Sabat."

Ziva shook her head. "I truly, sincerely, bloody hate pirates."

The ship gleamed like jet and fresh blood, black and crimson and gilt aflash: a three-decked monstrosity cleaving the waves to a frothing churn. Its sails billowed, high and proud. Ziva counted a row of cannons for each deck, their maws gilded like the ship. Most magnificent of all was its figurehead: a great golden sea-ork with jaws agape, as if ready to tear a gash from the Mistfox's side. It towered over the Mistfox, drowning it in shadow; it dwarfed the other ships. One was the Fishcutter, another a sleek Buyani icerunner. Another yet was an Isozi caravel, all curved lines and intricate paintwork. The last seemed insubstantial as a reflection, ghost-gray and ragged, its wake so slight it scarcely parted the waves.

Ziva watched as the pirate lords disembarked, as they made their way to the islet shores. She sensed the tension of the Witchhunters behind them, standing back with weapons sheathed and holstered. She felt it, too- the thrum of her pulse, the acid on her tongue, the way the world had been turned inside out, all certainty and tradition dashed to the stones. Their king, murdered. Their duties, dismantled. Their captains, treasonous and mutinous. Their reality turned to monsters and magic. They'd been, to the last soldier, trained to kill a pirate as soon as see one; now here they were consorting with their most lofty lords.

In a thunderstorm the rat and the hawk shelter together, Ziva thought, and smiled. If you could see me now, Ren. I think you'd finally like me.

Azare strode forward as the pirate lords advanced. He'd told Ziva of the lot, and she recognized them to a man: Sabat and Atana Bateleur, Captain Irene and her seconds Matteo and Nadya. Anoshka Safi, the red-haired Buyani firestarter, and the towering blue-skinned Isozi captain Noor. Her eyes were narrowed, and she moved with care thanks to the wounds Sirin had, according to Azare, gifted her in their last spat. Each brought a retinue of crewmen armed to the gills.

Last came an old woman. She made her stiff way up the beach with the help of a driftwood cane, each step a dry tap against the stones.

"The Eel Queen," Azare murmured at Ziva's glance. She didn't look like much of a threat, but then again, most pirates didn't get old. Ziva studied her, and as if reading her thoughts, the Eel Queen's pale eyes snapped to hers.

Ziva hissed a breath as the Eel Queen smiled, exposing a mouthful of teeth carved like scrimshaw.

Lord Sabat extended his arm, and she took it, her hands fragile as bird claws against the improbable mass of his forearm. The man himself was as colossal as his ship, all gilded crimson greatcoat and glistening muttonchops, his blunderbuss near itself another cannon.

He stared up the steps at Azare, his gaze cold with suppressed fury. The stare held for a heartbeat, for two. Ziva itched to lay hands to weapons. She forced them to stay at her sides, forced her spine straight and her eyes on Sabat.

"Witchhunter," he boomed at last. His voice rolled like a thundercrack, scattering the carrion birds. "Come back so we can kill you properly?"

"You received my summons." Azare glanced at Irene, who stared back, narrow-eyed, her face hard.

"That I did. And sad it was to see one of Bateleur's best reavers put to such work as playing message hawk to Witchhunter scum."

"Speak another word against me, Sabat-" Irene snarled.

"Then you know why I brought you here," Azare went on.

"To beg our assistance?" Atana said. "To entreat our forgiveness? For your sake, Captain, I hope you brought Sirin here to fight for you again."

"Sirin," Azare said, "is gone."

The pirate lords shifted. A mutter passed between Noor and Anoshka; the Eel Queen narrowed her eyes, gripping her cane tighter.

"Gone?" Atana said. "Dead?"

"Not yet. She is why I'm here. Not for forgiveness. Not for you to become my allies. I am not here to entreat friendship from any of you. It is your anger I appeal to now."

He lifted his arms. "Kill me where I stand. Burn me to my bones. Or use your anger to make right what I have done, to make right the world I had a hand in breaking."

"Where is Sirin?" Atana demanded.

"She's gone north to the Sunken Ruins of Rashavir. She took Luca Valere's creature with her, to draw along to her the monstrous Leviathan. We all saw what she did, the last time you were assembled. You saw the power she drank from the beast. Now she craves more, enough to become herself the destroyer. She doesn't seek balance, but wrath. No resettled world, but destruction. Vengeance."

He paused. "Anger."

"She seeks the whale god's power," Noor breathed. "Blasphemy."

"All Witchhunters are liars." Sabat reached for his blunderbuss; Ziva heard her crew go for their blades, heard the hiss of steel from scabbards. She lifted a hand. Not yet. "All Estarans have tongues of silver and knives hidden up their sleeves-"

"He's not lying, Sabat," Atana said, her voice soft, her eyes half-closed. "I can see it on his heart. He comes with nothing but the truth."

Sabat cut off and rounded on her. "How can you say this?"

"I say it because I know it. You know my power, given to me by my mother's Isozi blood-"

"Do not invoke Alaji's name in the Witchhunter's favor," Noor growled.

"Your power." Sabat towered over the little girl. He was nearly twice her height. Still she stood her ground. "None can lie to you, but you can twist whatever truths you like."

She lifted her chin. "You will mind your tongue, Lord Sabat. Unless you're forgetting who I am, and who my pa was?"

"Your father would be ashamed to see you so. His only daughter-and-heir, siding with the man who murdered him?" He snarled something in an unfamiliar tongue, rolling and timbrous. "I spit on your claims, Atana, and on your so-called power-"

"You dare to betray Bateleur's memory?" Irene gave a disgusted snort, her whaleglass eye aglitter. "Are there no loyal souls assembled here today?"

"You betray Bateleur's memory by not gutting them at first sight. You betray our tradition, our way of life."

"I say we give the Witchhunter a listen," Anoshka said, picking at her nails. "He came all this way."

"All of you, traitors!" Sabat drew his blunderbuss. Irene's blade was free and at his throat in a heartbeat; Noor's rifle was unslung, cocked, and Anoshka lifted her hands, her palms glimmering with embers. The Eel Queen stood, silent, watching not the other pirates but the sea.

"Name me a traitor, Sabat, and I will flay your skin to fix upon my mast," Noor spat.

"Stand down," Irene said. "Or I'll help her."

"Challenge me, do you, O Captain Irene?" Sabat laughed, a ferocious sound. "We'll see who skins who-"

"Oh, enough of this!" Ziva strode past Azare. "Hang all of you, shrieking and squabbling and wasting time. This isn't about loyalty. This isn't about promises and bonds of blood and old Saints-damned traditions. This is about what's true. What's real. You think you'll be able to stop that monster if Sirin gets her way? Any of you?"

"Do you?" Noor said. She spat on the ground. "Witchhunters come with nothing but stolen sorcery and reckless pride. A king's hounds, sent to do a king's dirty work-"

"Not only his hounds," Alois said.

His voice cut through the crowd, cut over Noor's next words. She braced back as he stepped forward, his shoulders stiff. For a moment, he stood, his chin lowered, his brow furrowed. Ziva stood, tensed and waiting. Would he fold? Would he run?

He did neither, and lifted his head.

Silence filled the ruins. Not a one spoke.

"I am King Alois Belmont," he said. "King of the Sister Isles of Estara. Son of Daval Belmont. Beloved of Bellana. And I will be by your side."

Alois held the eyes of the pirate lords, one at a time. "You fight alone and you'll die alone, crushed to the bottom of the sea. We don't fight alone."

He pointed to the witch-boy. "We come with a witch, and winds sung under his command to sail us. But he isn't enough. We need you- all of you- to follow us into the jaws of the beast, into the Hells themselves, to give Valere a chance."

"Luca?" Atana gasped.

Alois nodded. "The same. He's on his way north as we speak, riding on witchback to save all our skins. He has nothing now but madness and hope."

He lifted his chin, his amber eyes flashing with conviction. Ziva's heart pounded, fear and pride a heady pulse inside her.

"Come with us, and keep the beast off his back. Follow us, and keep your seas, and your freedom," Alois cried. "Fight with us and see the Great Leviathan reborn. You with us? Or are you the cowards who'll sit by and watch the seas burn, and yourselves with them?"

"No," Sabat muttered.

He lifted his head, and Ziva saw the black fire burning in his eyes. Fear splintered through her; she reached for her pistol.

"I would sooner die a coward than fight alongside Witchhunters," Sabat snarled, and whirled, and fired, point-blank, at Ziva.

The explosion of his blunderbuss cracked through Ziva's skull; impact hit her hard, taking her down. For an instant she thought his shot had torn her in half. She gasped as someone seized her shoulders and dragged her onto her back.

Azare. He stared down at her, his eyes wide, searching her face.

"Severin-" she whispered.

"Are you hurt?"

"Don't think so-"

"Then get up." He dragged her to her feet, and into chaos. Gunshots cracked; the floor was a wrecked crater, still smoking from Sabat's shot. She really would have been torn in half, had Azare not pushed her out of the way. Blades clanged, filling the air with their warp clamor: the Witchhunters, in their dark grays, sliced through the pirates like sharks, circling around Azare and Ziva, pulling in to shield them from their attackers.

Their attackers. Ziva searched the onslaught, her breath caught in her teeth. Everywhere: pistol smoke, blade flash, Sabat's crew in crimson locked in combat with Anoshka's men, Noor's Isozi with white braids whipping against their Witchhunters. She saw no sign of the witch-boy, nor of Alois. There; she spied the witch's ragged shape, spiraling into the clouds with Alois clenched in his claws. Nadya and Matteo fought alongside Irene, the trio moving as if with one mind.

Irene deflected a blow aimed for Lieutenant Guilan, and he flashed a grin in her direction.

"Obliged, madam!" he called.

"Captain to you," she sang back.

Guilan dipped his head. "Saints forgive me, I-"

He cried out as one of the Isozi's spear-muskets plunged into his stomach, ripping out his back with a spray of blood.

It spattered Ziva's face. She flinched, eyes wide. Again, the drone of flies. Again, blood slick on the backs of her teeth. The Isozi flung Guilan aside and charged her with a scream.

Ziva shook off her stupor. She tore her sword from its sheath and sprang to meet her. Steel sang, parted, sang again. The Isozi snarled; she was strong, much stronger than Ziva, driving her back and back with each blow. Ziva was quicker. She ducked, twisted, whirled around to the other woman's back, opening a gash in a visible patch of blue flesh.

The Isozi cried out, stumbling. Her guard fell: an instant of opportunity. Ziva glanced at Guilan. He lay, curled, in a pool of his own blood. Dead, dying- it didn't matter. Heat seized her, black and scouring; she tore her plain knife from its sheath and lifted it, to plunge it deep into the Isozi's spine, to sever it and her life in one blow.

And when she did?

This would go on, she knew. This fight would end in blood, and pain, and despair. This place wasn't a desert, but it would be dug into graves, sure enough- more than five, so many more. When would it end, then? When Sirin, or the monster she would make of herself, came to rain storm down on their heads? When the last soul standing lay at the bottom of the sea, and breathed their last? When all that was true, and good, and kind, was bled dry from the world, like it was bled from her? On, and on. More, and more.

No.

It ended here. It ended now. Ziva flung aside her knife and slammed her fist into the blue woman's jaw. The Isozi crumpled, out cold.

Behind her: a blade cleaved air. No time for pious reflection now. Ziva spun with a scream and dashed the sword aside, then cracked her skull against the man's forehead, one of Sabat's. He dropped, groaning and clutching his head.

"Azare!" Ziva yelled.

She searched the battle. Red hair- no, that was Anoshka, cackling as she fought, her hat lost, her hair aflame, truly aflame, up like a wick. She saw him then through Anoshka's heat shimmer, at the battle's heart. Witchhunters flanked him; Atana was pressed to his side, armed with a dagger and pistol of her own. A cut streaked down one cheekbone. He ducked and weaved, his back straight, his eyes narrowed, defending the girl.

"Severin!" Ziva screamed. She elbowed off a pirate and plunged toward him. "We have to stop this- we have to-"

Red filled her vision. Sabat. He moved like a rockslide against Azare, his sword a heavy, scarred cutlass. It swung; it screeched against Azare's slimmer Estaran blade. Ziva saw his eyes spring wide, his teeth clench. He set his weight, but Sabat had that advantage. Azare's boots scraped the tiles as he was driven back, their two blades locked.

"Lord Sabat-" Atana darted in, but Sabat swept her aside with his free arm, sending her spinning to her knees.

The sword lock broke. Azare spun his sword for a strike, but Sabat was ready. The back of his hand cracked across Azare's face, slamming him against a wall. He lay there, reeling and dazed.

Sabat's cutlass glinted, red in the dawnlight, as he lifted it to Azare's throat.

"Severin!" Ziva screamed.

A bellow filled the air. The ground quivered; waves hurled themselves up the beach, swamping the longboats and dashing against the ruin's foundations. Swords stilled in midair, battle cries shifting to shouts of shock and terror.

Hot wind blasted Ziva as she whirled toward the coming dawn. Her mouth, halfway to shaping Azare's name, hung wide in disbelief.

A shape filled the water, a vast black column surging through the waves, hide deep gray and glistening, encrusted with scars and barnacles. A sea-ork, the biggest Ziva had seen, and coming straight for them. In a fanburst of spume its tusks broke the surface and speared toward the skies, twin sawtoothed curves vast enough to impale ships and take them crashing to seabed. Its jaws followed, long and saurian and clustered with teeth, a second bellow already rumbling from deep within the beast.

It rose higher from the waves, swimming with powerful strokes of its forefins and long, flat tail. Its wake sent the moored ships to swinging, its body twice the length of Sabat's galleon, its cold yellow eyes set on the beach.

"Sea-ork!" cried Matteo. "Bull sea-ork, coming in fast and hungry! All of you, into the ruins! Now!"

The pirates scrambled higher up the beach, away from the monster. The Eel Queen danced and cackled, waving her stick through the air. Ziva stayed where she was.

A slow grin spread across her face.

Light flared from the sea-ork's back: prismatic light, channeled through the blade of a whaleglass sword. Cereza gripped its hilt with one hand, the other wound around a spike on the sea-ork's neck ridge. She didn't just control it; she rode it, holding Valeria's sword aloft. The sunrise fractured through the blade and set the air alight, set the waves aflame.

The sea-ork reared up the beach, carving great gouges in the sand with its forelimbs, another roar blasting Ziva with hot breath. Pirates crouched and huddled around her, but Lord Sabat stood, lifting his sword from Azare's throat as he faced the sea-ork.

"Korag Magra," he breathed.

He approached, tossing his sword aside, his hands open, beseeching. He stopped before the beast's tusks and fell to his knees.

"Ork Mother," he said. His eyes shone. "You have come."

"Stand down, Lord Sabat," Cereza called from her place atop the beast's neck. She lowered Valeria's sword, pointing it down at him. "All of you who fought for him, too. And be quick about it."

"You!" Sabat said.

"Me." Cereza stood, balancing on two struts of back-spine. "I said. Stand. Down."

Sabat signaled to his men. Ziva heard the clatter of arms laid aside, the murmur of the pirates, whispers of reverence or disbelief.

"Then I welcome my death at your jaws," Sabat said. "Ork Mother-"

"You think I'm here to kill you? Triune, no. And I'm not Korag Magra." She touched the sea-ork's neck, and it lowered its great head. The lower curves of its tusks came to rest, gently, on the sand. Cereza followed, climbing gingerly down its muzzle and onto the beach. She stood before Lord Sabat, the point of Valeria's sword set at his knees.

"Get up," she said. "Come on, now."

He rose. He towered over her, but she stared up at him unblinking, her soaked hair plastered to her cheeks.

"You heard them," she said. "They came to you, here at world's end. They came to you at the hour of greatest need. Now what do you say?"

Sabat's grin was a craggy thing, glittering with teeth silver as his fingernails. "She is magnificent," he said, nodding at the sea-ork.

"She is," Cereza said. "But she needs to be free."

The sea-ork snorted, gouting steam through its blowhole; warm seawater spattered Ziva's face. Cereza lifted her hand, and the great creature reared backward, diving from the shallows into deeper waters. It crashed to the waves and sank to a shadow, the ridge of its spine glistening for a moment in the dawn before vanishing, too, gone back to the depths.

Cereza slumped; her eyes fluttered shut, her face drawn. She pressed her hand to her heart, the strain bright in her eyes. Still, she stayed on her feet. Wind stirred at Ziva's side, and Alois stumbled from the black flutter of the witch's wings, his face ashen, his expression set.

He glanced at Ziva, and she nodded.

He smiled, just a little.

Sabat turned to the gathered pirates.

"World's end this may not be," he said. "Our hour of greatest need, not yet upon us. But I cannot deny the prophets have come." He took up his cutlass and plunged it deep into the ground. "And I cannot refuse them."

He faced Azare, and Alois. Conflict tightened the lines of his face, then settled. He produced an enormous S-curved pipe from his greatcoat, lit it, and took a deep drag.

"I won't fight for you, Witchhunter, nor your king. But I will fight with you," he said, pungent smoke curling round his muttonchops. "And so will my crew. And so will those loyal to me."

"And to me," Atana said as she picked herself up from the ground. "We'll have words, Sabat. For now, we haven't a moment to waste."

She climbed atop a broken crust of wall and lifted her hand to the sky.

"All of you," she cried. "All those who count yourselves people of these seas, whaleblood and freemen and pirates to the marrow- we sail as one."

"With the wind," the witch-boy whispered at Ziva's side, and for the first time since Ziva had first seen him, shot down and cowering, his blood black on the ancient stones underfoot, he almost sounded afraid.

***

Ziva found Azare, later. He sat by Guilan's body, lain out on a canvas sheet. A bowl of seawater rested by his head. Azare was washing him, cleaning the blood from his face and the sand from his eyelashes. Cereza's sea-ork was long gone, nothing left but great furrows carved into the beach, already smoothed over by the tide. Around Lapin was a moil of pirates climbing into longboats, of casting off and signaling from ship to ship, of creaking sails and shouted orders. Atana knelt alongside the wounded, feeding them sips of water from the Belmont cup. She was teaching Alois, Ziva saw, the king's hands red to the elbows, on his knees in the sand and the blood.

Once, maybe, she might have scoffed at the sight of a gentle king, one who knelt to help reavers and brigands drink. Once, she might have not believed there were ways to be strong that did not depend on the pain of another.

In the midst of the beach Azare seemed over-still. He looked up as Ziva stood over him, on the far side of the canvas.

"He was the only one?" she said.

Azare nodded. "Some wounds, but no other lives lost on our side." He smoothed down the lapel of his uniform, lingering on the speared wing signet affixed to the fabric. "He was a good man."

"He was. A proper lieutenant." Ziva sank to her knees beside Guilan's body. "Better one than I proved, anyhow."

She ached, her muscles sore as she'd ever remembered them. Her head was worse. She watched Azare clean the blood from Guilan's mouth, then lifted her eyes.

"I want to bury him," she said.

"We need to move," Azare said, gently, watching her.

"No. We need to bury him. Properly, Severin."

He paused, then nodded. "Then we bury him."

They left the chaos of the beach for the far side of the islet, the lee face of its ruins, where the shadows were still cool and blue and tasted of night. They found a spot of loose ground under a section of wall and began digging, their borrowed spades making quick work of the soil. It wasn't long before they had a grave.

"It's no shrine in the Witchhunter tower," Ziva said, leaning on her spade. "But I hope it's enough."

Azare brushed his fingers over Guilan's canvas shroud. "So do I."

He climbed from the grave and helped her fill it in. They stood over it, silent. Neither of them was a priest, but no words were needed, not for a soldier's burial. Gulls circled above, shadows moving like ghosts across the sand.

After some time Azare reached into his uniform and withdrew Ziva's knife. "This is yours, I think."

"You should know. It was in your heart."

"Might be mistaken. The heart's a foolish thing."

Ziva took the knife. She flipped it in her hands, examining its blade. "I thought Sabat would take off your head out there."

"He very nearly did."

"I almost lost you, Severin."

"Are you afraid of that now?"

She dug her thumbnail into a groove in her knife's bone hilt. "Always was. So I did it first. I was ever a spiteful thing."

"I think much more than that." He paused. "What I feel hasn't changed, Lapin. Not for you. I remember what I told you, still. And I'll swear by it, as much as any vow I ever made."

Ziva didn't answer. Her throat was as tight as her grip on the knife. She couldn't answer him, not now, and maybe after twenty years together he understood that. Maybe he didn't. Either way, he was at her side.

Azare glanced toward the beach. "We should go."

"Give me a moment."

He nodded and began away. Ziva didn't watch him leave. She didn't look up, not even when the air chilled, when the snowfall spackled the grave with white. When she sensed the air pressure shift, and she knew she wasn't alone.

"You're scared," she said.

"So are you."

Ziva lifted her head. The witch-boy perched on the wall above the grave, wings shrouding him and Ziva both from the snow.

"Well, yeah," Ziva said. "Remember the monster."

"Not that."

She drew a short breath. "I miss the days of being sure," she said quietly. "I miss the days of knowing."

The boy's eyes were dim, his arms hugged around his knees. He didn't look like a boy anymore, nor a monster, but old, and so tired.

"Maybe you never knew," he said.

They said nothing more, but stood together in silence, watching the snow fall past the shadow of his wings.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 37- Isabella

***

I know what we have to do, she'd said, and felt the ring of decision echo inside her, final as the tolling of a bell.

"You came with the dreadnought, yes?" Isabella said. Enzo nodded. "What manner of firepower does she carry?"

"Spellfire bolts. Cannons along her flanks. Thrice the firepower of a Lapidaean warship." He lowered his head. "Bell-"

"Listen to me. We cannot kill that monster." She pointed. It spilled toward them, bringing the sea with it. Waves roared far below, rising to glassy, foam-flecked peaks, illuminated from within. The sea churned, not with life but with countless glimmering shapes tossed by the current. Triune, it was turning all the fish of the coast to whaleglass. It was stealing the sky, the sea, all things warped out of shape. Out of balance.

It would bring nothing but more death, more destruction, more cities crying out for someone to save them.

Isabella's eyes stung, but her spine was straight, full of steel. Her blood was no warlord's, but it was her own, strong and true. She couldn't save her mother; she couldn't save Valeris. But she could save her family. She could give them this chance.

She could do this.

"We can't," she said again. "It dies, and all of this has been for nothing. I don't even know what kind of firepower could kill it. All we have to do is distract it, keep it down for long enough to give Luca and Cereza time."

She glanced to Luca. "I came here in a warship, now moored down in the bay. Two-master, eighty-ton. Can you sail it?"

"You know I can, but-"

"Then sail it. Take the ship north to Rashavir. Make preparations to go, and quickly."

"What in all Hells are you planning?"

"There's a dreadnought full of ghost soldiers down there, Luca, one for every bolt cannon." She felt her face twist in hard satisfaction. "We're going to steer that dreadnought into the beast's black heart and light it to the skies with spellfire. If that doesn't get it off your back, I don't know what will."

"We?" Enzo said.

She faced him. "You and me, Enzo."

"Let me do this alone-"

"Hells take that. Shut up and follow me."

His eyes glinted. "Yes, your Majesty."

Luca hurried forward as Isabella turned toward the path down the mountainside. "Isabella, wait-"

"Luca, you need to get down to my ship. You'll be well-suited to captain her, I trust."

"I don't bloody care about your ship or how well-suited I am. I care about you. Triune, Bell, you can't-"

"I can," Isabella said, rounding on him. He breathed hard, his eyes wide and bright, his brow furrowed with worry.

And love, she saw, with a pang through her that struck her to the heart. Her next breath was tight, and she felt that love reflected in herself, not stealing her fear but strengthening all else.

She could never forgive their mother. She could never forgive what had been done, and what she had done in turn. Like Enzo, the two of them so wrenched and wounded by the past, she was tied to that anger, chained like one of their ghosts. It never went away. It would never let her go.

But she was glad, too. Glad they had been loved, and were together again against all odds. Glad she had strength enough for this now.

"I can," she said again. "I will defend my country, my people, as is my duty as their queen. And that includes you, Luca. All of you."

"Bell-" Luca choked.

"Hush." She caught him in a one-armed hug and pulled him in, fast and fierce. Cereza drew close, her hands winding into Isabella's coat and clinging on, her head pressed to Isabella's shoulder.

She had to make herself let go. Cereza clutched at her hand, her face blotchy with weeping.

"Go," Isabella said. "And Triune give you calm seas-"

"-And clear skies," Luca finished.

"Go," Isabella said again, with force, "Now, damn you."

Enzo moved to her side, and together they hurried down the mountain path, toward the distant bay below. The sunrise strengthened, daylight spun and warped into strange patterns by the storm. The wind churned, hot and cold in turns. Ice needled Isabella's face as they descended into the clifftop meadows once more.

Her ship rocked a few dozen yards from shore, at a crude driftwood jetty. The sleek, maneuverable brig rose and fell on huge swells that near swamped the beach, waves crashing high on the rocky shore. The air hummed under the weight of vast engines. She tasted the tang of metal and burning ork-oil on the storm winds before she caught sight of the dreadnought moored at the bay mouth.

Its vast hammer-headed bulk blocked their way out, sheltering the bay from the worst of the coming storm. Its shadow fell across her warship, drowning all but its upper rigging in darkness. Its prow loomed, made for ramming, its flanks seamed with rivets and sheathed in spellforged armor that looked near impenetrable. A masterwork in engineering, she had to admit. Magnificent, but she had no time to marvel.

As she and Enzo approached, the Falcii watchman hurried across the deck, his face pale as he clutched at his rifle strap.

"I sent up a flare, my queen," he called. "The others-"

"The others will gather at the clifftop. Go to them. I need this ship."

"Majesty?"

"You and the other Falcii have new orders. Shelter in Sanjorra until the storm is gone, then go overland to Valeris. I've left commands there for my impending absence. Follow them. Our people deserve that."

"Yes...yes, Majesty."

"And be quick about it," Isabella added. He ducked a bow and climbed down over the side, then hurried up the steps chiseled into the cliffside, toward the village above.

Isabella turned to Luca.

"Wait until we're close," she said. "Then catch wind and sail like the Hells are at your back. You, and her."

She nodded at Sirin, who nodded in return.

Cereza rushed forward. "What about us?"

"You need to go back to Sanjorra. You, and Alois, and your witch."

She looked up to where the witch crouched atop a rock, her wings half-furled, her golden eyes narrowed. "If my sister protests, keep her on land. Keep her safe."

Cereza advanced on her. "Isabella, I am going with-"

"No, you're not. Luca is going north. I am going to face that monster. Valeris needs you." She put her hands to Cereza's shoulders. "All of Lapide needs you. That is what matters now."

Cereza blinked hard, then nodded, her teeth clenched tight. "Hells with you, Isabella."

"Let's hope not." She reached out, and Cereza folded into her arms. She pressed a kiss to her sister's forehead. "Keep it safe for me."

"I will," Cereza said, her voice thick with tears.

Isabella faced the ocean as the wind sharpened, as the monster howled. Its roar filled the skies, filled the air, shook the ground under her feet, splintering the waves to whitecaps, blue radiance crackling through the stormclouds.

Isabella narrowed her eyes, watching the beast grow closer. I'll see you pay, monster, she vowed. I'll see you hurt for what you've done.

She watched Luca and Sirin climb aboard her warship, the little creature safe in Luca's arms; she watched as he became its captain, falling into the rhythm of lines and sails, directing Sirin around its deck. She watched as the witch took Cereza's hand and held it, tight, as Alois supported her other side, as together they climbed higher up the cliffside path, toward Sanjorra above.

Enzo was a warm presence at her side. She turned to him, her spine straight, her resolve steady.  He understood.  

He lifted his hand, and silver light twined under his skin, filling his palm with moonslight. Isabella hardly needed to concentrate. She drew breath, and with it: power. It filled her, too, his power, his tethers, the burden of his ghosts, the tense flexion of the control he held over them. It was miraculous, her body made many, a fractured consciousness, a new muscle.

She drew another breath, and the power sang, strengthening between them, like they were ghosts in control of one another.

She looked to Luca, and he looked back, and nodded, once. It was all she needed.

It was time.

***

They rowed out to the dreadnought.

They climbed aboard.

Below, the waves shattered to spume against its armored flanks. Ghost soldiers stood at bolt cannons, at the helm; their whispers pushed at her mind, ready, waiting, the deck humming beneath Isabella's feet.

She blinked, getting her bearings; she scarcely felt the pitch and roll of the deck, this monstrosity was so massive.

"Bit much, don't you think?" she muttered.

Enzo smiled. "King Daval was nothing if not ambitious."

She'd been aboard an Estaran warship before, great behemoths of enginecraft and armor. Nothing like this, mastless and bristling, its ramming spike a great single-horned spear silhouetted black against the sky. Isabella followed its point, and felt the pulse of dread deep inside her at the monster beyond. Her eyes watered; like before, she could not focus on it. Swells of shining, scar-riven flesh, scale and hide and juts of bone, black and glistening and lit garish blue as lightning crackled through its shroud of stormclouds and rain.

Her dread deepened as its jaws parted, as its teeth upon teeth caught that stormlight and became the color of the seas set aflame, the color of spellfire burning, catching, rising to devour the stars.

Those stars seemed to flutter in Isabella's eyes; she heard her own screams as she woke from long-ago nightmares, tasted the bitter tang of horror on her tongue as she rushed to the window, watching the night sky pale with the explosion that lit the horizon.

Father-

Spellfire on the breeze. Blue embers, a rain of them, drifting in the wind. All her nightmares, all her dreams- they didn't matter anymore. The past was dead, was gone and burned, and all that mattered was now.

She could not change what had been done, but she could change this moment. She could take it, and wield it, and stand.

She didn't need to ask the question, but she did anyway, and her voice had the ring of steel in it. "Now?"

Enzo nodded. "At your command."

Isabella lifted her arm. "Take us toward the beast! Engines at full! Take us 'til we see the whites of its eyes! Take us 'til there's no chance of stopping! Forward!"

She sliced it down, and the thud of the engines strengthened. The dreadnought lunged, slicing through the beast's waves; it bellowed again, and coursed forward, back rising to part the sea. The waves rose huge as cliffs, hammering the dreadnought's flanks and flooding the deck with glowing foam, full of wriggling things and dying fish, flopping and twisting and half-consumed by tumorous crystal. Rain followed, sheets of it glimmering like godsblood, like whaleglass; it hit their decks, drenching her and Enzo in an instant.

The air vibrated, at once charged. Lightning crackled: a great cage of it, striking the sea, the hum and burn and the smell of ozone raising the small hairs on Isabella's arms. A bolt sheared down; a flash of light, and the dreadnought's upper rigging burst like fruit, scattering the deck with shards of twisted metal.

Isabella's breath tightened in her throat, but the ghost soldiers didn't flinch. She felt them working, felt them rustling inside their corpse bodies, whispers mounting in her skull. She felt flashes of their consciousness: terror, and awe, and confusion.

I'll free you. I swear to you, you'll rest today. Just be with me now. Stay with me.

"Enzo," she called. "Is Luca's ship free of the bay?"

"I don't see them in this damned rain."

She hazarded a glance back. Her heart pounded; she searched the rain, the churning seas. She felt a twist of relief as she glimpsed sails in a valley between two wave summits: their ship, cutting in the opposite direction, stealing the winds and using them to gain a head start.

Clever lad, Isabella thought with admiration.

Below her, the engines strained, burning hot as they labored to keep the dreadnought on its course. Too hot? Isabella pushed through the tearing force of the rain, toward the bow, the ramming spike slicing their path. Smoke billowed in their wake, and she smelled the reek of burning ork-oil, amplified by the wind and by the Leviathan's power, making all things thrice-fold. She felt the cycle of blood as it raced through her body, the drumbeat of her power, her connection to Enzo, the source- not wavering, but blazing strong. She caught hold of the railing, but saw nothing below save rain and mist and the diffuse, glowing sea, full of light.

"Ready the first volley," she shouted, her voice torn from her as it left her. The ghosts understood. The high grind of metal to metal filled the air, cutting over the storm, and around her the bolt cannons swiveled, alchemic bolts smoking in their firing grooves.

"Fire!" Enzo roared.

The scream of alchemic bolts, the tug of wind in their backdraft; they burst, like some vast fireworks display: a brilliant flare of blue, a star shooting, not falling. Their path carved a flock of blue arcs across the sky, transmuting the clouds to mist and streams of sparks, parting the Leviathan's storm-

They winked out, one by one, extinguished.

Isabella's heart twisted. She gripped the railing hard, crystal hand scraping the metal. "Second volley," she cried.

"It's too powerful." Enzo was at her side, holding her arm as the dreadnought pitched forward, coursing down the crest of the next swell, the sea veined with spume.

"Twice the bolts, then. That...that just wasn't enough-" She twisted, searching the decks, the ghosts busy at their posts. "Fire! Fire when ready! Bloody fire!"

Again: blue blazed, drowning out the darkness of the storm, paling the sea and drenching Isabella and Enzo in light. Blue burned in Isabella's eyes; she was rigid, tense, waiting for the flames.

They were there.

The monster howled, and Isabella saw it: blue fire, catching, blossoming, erupting into a torrent along one of its coils. The rain rippled as the flames expanded, eating away at that impossible flesh, exposing meat like a night sky.

Isabella's laugh of triumph burst from her, raw and half-mad. "A hit," she cried. "A glorious hit. You see that, monster? You feel it, don't you? You'll feel worse, I swear that-"

"Bell," Enzo said, his voice low, strained.

Her laugh died; so did the fire. The sea rose, drenching; the inferno guttered, choked, drowned. The Leviathan roared, and Isabella thought she heard triumph in the sound.

And rage.

And vengeance.

The water lifted; it weaved, becoming no longer storm-waves, but a swirling mass; a maelstrom, Isabella thought, but airborne; awe tangled with terror as she watched the entire ocean seem to heave itself into the sky, an extension of one of the monster's vast clawed forelimbs. Its jaws parted again, dripping with the remnants of the spellfire. Dread twisted through Isabella like a knife in her guts.

"Hard to starboard!" she screamed, whirling toward the ghost soldiers.

The Leviathan raked out, all the force of the maelstrom behind it.

The dreadnought banked, hard; Isabella felt the engines below shaking, heard something catch and squeal, metal splintering with the effort. Now they really were overtaxed, breaking apart. Please, Triune, please- The ramming spike swooped away from the beast's heart, aimed toward what Isabella knew was the open sea; if they could get clear, they could come back round, hit it where it was wounded, if they could get clear-

The world cracked.

White splintered Isabella's vision; she felt her body jarred, like the weight of the sea had come down on her, crushing her to the deck. Metal screamed as the Leviathan's foreclaw caught the bow, carving deep gouges into the dreadnought's armor. Isabella slammed, hard, into the railing; bones popped, the sound detonating wet and awful through her head.

Her ribs, she thought. She wasn't sure. She tasted blood. It spattered her front, the deck, black in the next flash of lightning, black as it covered Enzo's hands, holding onto her, keeping her from going over the side.

Lightning cracked again. The dreadnought listed. They were taking on water, Isabella realized as Enzo dragged her away from the side: the sea was rushing into the gouges the beast had torn from the bow and flooding the lower decks. Impossibly, the engines still worked. She felt them inside her, like they were a part of her, as much as her pain and her heartbeat, as much as this power, stolen and given, and now hers.

Her vision flickered. She saw cedars, creaking in the wind. Her mother's gray eyes, so like her own. She smelled heartlain, night-flowering, a carpet of it between the trees. You have to be ready for it, Isabella. You have to be ready for anything.

"Enzo," she managed. Her breathing was ragged; each inhale seared, a pain like the fire was inside her, now. The rain was full of stars. They danced in her eyes. She leaned hard against him as he kept them upright on a tilting deck. "Not...not enough. Is it."

"We can fire again, Bell. We have the bolts-"

"All the...all the bolts on this bloody ship...won't stop it. Not for long. We need more power. More...more fire."

The smell of ork-oil lingered on her tongue. She raised her eyes to Enzo's. They were reddened with salt, glinting amber in the firelight.

"This ship," she muttered. "What's the fuel?"

"Ork-oil. Refined."

"Strong stuff." A weak smile curved her lips. "Flammable."

His eyes sparked. "You don't mean-"

"I do, Acier." She nodded at the Leviathan, gathering itself, the crater in its side glistening and smoking with the remnants of their attack. "I say full bloody speed ahead. Right where it hurts."

She felt his breathing catch. His grip on her tightened as he gathered her close, keeping her on her feet. His eyes hardened, hawkish and bright, resolute. Something of her mother in them. Something of his, too.

"Won't kill it," Isabella said. "But it might hobble it until it can lick its wounds and limp after Luca."

"We buy them time," Enzo said. "I like the sound of that."

"Think you're up for it, Acier?"

"You and me both. Unless you're scared."

Isabella flashed him a grin, digging her elbow into his side. "You wish."

The Leviathan's head arced from the waves. Isabella saw its eyes; they blazed blue and gold, agonized and full of anger. Destroyer, she thought, the death that came to all things, the flame that burned the world clean so the new might grow. Without it, there was no ending. Without it, all was incomplete.

No ending, and no beginning, either.

Balance, she thought, and smiled a little to herself. See, Luca? I think I'm beginning to understand.

She felt her broken ribs shift and crackle inside her as she gripped Enzo, pulling herself straight.

"Ready the cannons," Enzo commanded.

The order rang through their tethers, into the ghosts, and through them.

"Now," he said. "Aim."

Isabella felt them comply, heard the dry whispers of the dead, felt them rustle in their corpse moorings. Aim. Not for the monster, but for their own engines, for the reservoirs of ork-oil that fueled them. Pure, and flammable. They'd catch in an instant.

Fast, and clean.

The pain had drowned all feeling to a high shriek in her head. She fought it, fought the unconsciousness, the shock threatening to pull her under. The Leviathan roared, and surged toward them, jaws wide.

Where it hurts, Isabella thought. Her heart hammered. Enzo's hand was a vise grip on her arm, warmer than the frigid rain.

"You deserve this, you know," Isabella said, between her teeth. "All of this."

"I know I do."

"I told you I could never forgive you."

"Even now?"

She let out a ragged laugh. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Absolved at the feet of the Triune? Unless you're a heathen atop the rest."

"I never had much time for gods. Too much to do."

"Is betrayal so much work as that?"

"Like you wouldn't believe."

She managed a smile, a nod. "I've come to believe a lot, Enzo."

The Leviathan lunged closer. Her heart raced, faster, faster. She felt herself crying, tasted the salt of tears, and blood, and seawater on her lips. It tasted like life. Not hers, but Lapide's, and Estara's, and Luca's, too.

Let him be safe, she prayed. Let this all be made right. All of it.

"You suppose we'll be cast to the glowlands, after this?" Isabella asked.

"Or lifted up, borne to the Triune on wings of smoke. This is a kind of pyre, after all."

"Wherever we end up, I hope it's better than this."

Enzo shrugged. "Can't be worse."

Her hand found his, and held on. Silver light wreathed them. The Leviathan's jaws parted above, endless teeth, endless rain, lightning arcing through the depths of its maw. The monster was coiled around them, Isabella realized, surrounding the dreadnought above and below, trapping them at the heart of its storm.

It stared down, eyes vast as the moons, and Isabella stared back, refusing to look away, refusing to cower. It might be a god, but she'd ripped a hole in its side and bled it out into the ocean. Now she'd do worse.

Her pulse raced in Enzo's grip, but inside she was calm as sunrise. "Do you think we would have been friends, had all been different?" she asked.

"You wouldn't be you if all had been different."

"I suppose that's true." Isabella paused. "I may be damned to say it-"

"Say it. However dire your sins, the gods' are worse."

"Then whatever else, I'm glad. I'm glad to have had you with me," Isabella said. "I'm glad we have each other."

She glanced at him in time to see him smile. His face was lit by the Leviathan's light, by the coming sunrise.

"I lived all my life with the dead," he told her, softly. "Now I'll end it with the living."

"That doesn't seem right."

"No matter, Bell." He stroked her knuckles with his thumb. His skin was warm. "It's a fair trade."

"Are you ready?"

He was. "Give the command."

Isabella drew breath, through broken ribs, through lashing rain and the Leviathan's howl, and gave the command.

Fire.

The Leviathan's jaws descended.

The bolt cannons hit the dreadnought below her feet, ripping through the gashes in its armor plating.

The hiss-catch of ork-oil, the muffled concussion of blue flames. An explosion, an eruption, spellfire drowning out shadow.

Enzo's hand tightened around hers.

Isabella closed her eyes as all became light.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 9- Luca

***

Atana Bateleur, daughter of the pirate lord Bateleur, lady of An Gholam and mistress of the Fishcutter, stared at Luca from across the stateroom, her small hands clasped atop Captain Irene's map table. The Belmont cup- the tiny whaleglass chalice that healed who drank from it- sat by her hands, glimmering like a spark of starlight under the lamps. Luca noticed it was rarely far from her reach. Captain Irene herself leaned against a wall, picking at her nails with a knife, while Nadya guarded the doors, massive arms crossed over her chest.

"Is that really necessary?" Luca asked, gesturing toward Nadya.

She laughed, low in her throat. "Try running, little prince. See how necessary I can be."

"Of course she is," Atana said. Her voice was high and clear, her blue eyes far too hard for a child's. She was a girl of twelve or so, with deep brown skin and abundant cinnamon-colored curls, her posture straight-backed and rigid in the marrow-wood chair. She stared across the map table at Luca and Cereza, who sat watching her in turn.

Luca couldn't help but feel he was on trial. He was, in a way. Atana and Irene had listened to his account of the Leviathan's island, the Witchhunters' attack, Cereza's death and her resurrection, the way the Great Leviathan had dissolved into its maelstrom. Before that, they'd given him and Cereza and Sirin time to rest, to recover, to eat something besides raw fish and hardtack. Luca had trimmed his hair and shaved, and his face still tingled. Still, he didn't miss the way the pirates watched him, how their hands never strayed too far from their weapons. He might not be in the brig, like Severin Azare, but he, Cereza, and Sirin were prisoners onboard the Fishcutter all the same.

"You're here for a reason, Luca," Atana told him.

"I can only tell you what I saw."

"Only?" Atana frowned. "Your sister was dying of a terrible curse last I saw you. And this...this creature..." She nodded at Puppy, who sat in Luca's lap, watching Atana with a steady blue-and-gold stare. "I don't know where to start with that."

"I suppose it's only fair you have a lot of questions," Luca supplied.

"Damn right it is," Irene said, digging her knife under her thumbnail.

Luca poured himself another glug of honey whiskey from a Buyani porcelain jug shaped like a pair of entwined platefish, scales painted with patterns in delicate blue. He'd need all the help he could get tonight, and drinking himself senseless seemed as good a method as any. "What do you want to know?"

"Is it true?" Atana said. "Is the Leviathan dead?"

"I'm not sure," Luca admitted. "All I know is...I spoke to it. Inside..." He touched the side of his head, fingertips pressing through the untidy waves of his hair. "It's nothing like we understood. It dies. It dies and comes back again, resurrecting itself over and over, and when the Witchhunters shot it, it was at the end of its death cycle. It didn't do me the courtesy of explaining more."

"Bloody lot of good that does us," Irene muttered.

"I think it's a damn good story," Matteo said. He sprawled in a window alcove, picking at a battered old lute. He strummed it, the melancholy twang reverberating through the cabin. "Wouldn't make a bad song, either. I've already composed most of a lovely little tune about your victory against Bateleur's white sarkyvor. Would you like to hear it? Of course you would."

With another twang of the lute Matteo began to sing in a pleasant tenor. "Prince Luca Valere, he came from the East- through cunning and courage, he vanquished the beast- when the fight it grew futile, and hope it grew dim- he plucked up his courage and did the beast in-"

"If you sing any more of that bloody awful song," Irene said, interrupting Matteo mid-note, "I'll restring that bloody lute with your guts."

"That's not a very nice way to talk to your brother."

Atana held up her hand. "Shut. Up."

Matteo shut up. Luca smirked at him, and he smirked back. Irene muttered something under her breath, her whaleglass eye a point of blue-white winking in the gloom.

"And the creature?" Atana went on.

Puppy yipped. Luca set his hand to the curve of its head. "It was left behind after the Leviathan was gone. I think it's part of it. Some remnant."

"That can't be the Great Leviathan," Irene muttered.

"If you have an alternative hypothesis, please," Luca said, a note of strain in his voice. "Do enlighten us."

"Bold of you, boy," Irene said. The oyster knife was a wink of steel in her hand, sharp enough to take out an eye. "Don't forget it was you who brought the Witchhunters to our shores, brought spellfire to our city-"

"Don't forget it was you who kidnapped and chained and made to enslave us," Luca shot back. "I wouldn't get too righteous."

"You stole my witch."

Luca gave a choked laugh. "You stole me!"

"Enough!" Atana stood, clutching at the silver-banded plait of white hair she wore around her neck. Her father Bateleur had worn a matching one, and whatever it meant to her, Luca was certain it was precious. She looked from Luca to Irene and back again. "Arguing is pointless. It helps nothing. It doesn't explain my missing ships."

"Missing ships?" Luca asked.

"Three captains didn't return with their spoils," Irene muttered.

She pressed her fingertips to one of the maps, weighted down with a pair of fossilized ammonites inlaid with fire opals. The map spread, gloriously colored. Currents arced across the Inner Sea, islands and sea boundaries flung across its expanse. Buyan and Vodyenai, Ishvol and Noga, broken archipelagos and treacherous ghost-lands, the Gulf of Storms and the Ork Roads illustrated with all manner of strange monster bristling with spume and bared fangs. Even the Sunken Ruins of Rashavir were there, far to the north, surrounded by vast ice tortoises and inhospitable sheets of never-melting ice.

In its midst Luca made out Lapide and Estara, tiny flecks of green ink in an endless sea. His throat tightened.

"Here. And here." Irene indicated where the ships had gone missing, sketching a deft course from the String of Pearls toward the border waters of the Outer Sea. The tightness of tears settled into a weight in Luca's guts. The Great Blue. Their courses had charted them to the boundary line at the edge of the Great Blue.

He glanced sideways at Cereza and found her looking back, her fist clenched over her heart.

"Every one of them knew Bateleur would feed their guts to the gulls if they didn't pay what was owed," Irene went on. "They'd have no home in An Gholam. No safe harbor, no friend on stone nor sea. It's not a treason done lightly."

"Maybe they're late," Luca said. "Storms come like demon spirits in midsummer, all across the Inner Sea and the Outer-"

"You think the Leviathan's death didn't warp the world, boy?" Irene snarled. "You think you didn't damn us all when you rode out there with the Witchhunter on your back?"

Luca let out a strained laugh. "Come on, Irene. Don't pretend you’re here for any reason other than the Lapidaean gold I promised you."

Irene fixed him with a stare, then reached for a bucket and tipped it onto the table. Its copper lid clattered over the wood. The smell of rotting fish filled the cabin, blistering in these confines. Cereza pressed her hands to her face, and Luca stood slowly, his brow furrowed.

Fish slithered from the bucket, unfamiliar creatures with long, trailing tentacles and spots of dawn-pink bioluminescence. They must have been gorgeous when alive, but it took Luca only a moment to realize something was deeply wrong. Their bodies were warped, twisted with tumorous growths, hard and faceted.

Not growths. Crystal. It shone in the lamplight, iridescent and glimmering, like Cereza's scars, like whaleglass.

"Plenty more where those came from," Irene said. "We netted them on our way out to find you."

"What is it?"

"We were hoping you'd answer that."

"I've never seen anything like this before. It's almost like-"

"Almost like me," Cereza murmured.

"-Like the crystal is growing from inside them, like it's..." Luca's mind whirled. He wanted his workshop, his scalpels and lenses and skulls beneath bell jars, the countless books of the Palace library. "Like they're cursed, too."

He touched a spike of crystal. It seemed to erupt from inside the dead fish, growing out from its innards.

"A curse on all things," he murmured.

Light spat at his fingertips-

He saw. A rush, a splintered blur- the moons in the sky, churning darkness, waves to shatter islands. The ocean split by an impossible form. A howl, storm and maelstrom and rage, unending rage, power rising to meet it. The moons split and cracked apart, and the shadow rose, and so did the anger, enough to bring down the sky, enough to break it apart and cast it into the sea and make it into nothing-

Luca flinched back. He tasted blood, thick on his tongue. His pulse thudded in his throat. The walls were hung with charms, and they chimed softly, bird-bone and fish teeth, silver ornaments glimmering like eyes in the dark.

He touched the crystal again. Nothing happened. It was cool and smooth under his fingertips. Whatever power he'd felt in it was gone.

He withdrew his hand and set it to Puppy's fur. It sparked against his skin with the little creature's anxiety. He stroked it, calming it, centering himself.

Consequences, the Leviathan whispered in his voice.

Luca ground his teeth. Why didn't you tell me more? Why didn't you tell me anything that could help you?

"Then let me make it right," he said once he trusted his voice not to shake. "All of this."

"How?" Irene said.

"I don't know for sure," he said. "But I promised the Leviathan I would. I don't intend to go back on my promises to a god. Do I look like a liar?"

"Sort of," Matteo said, with a shrug.

"Whatever we do," Atana said, cutting off Luca's retort, "it's useless trying to plan in the middle of the ocean. We'll recruit the wisdom of my pa's trusted commanders once we reach An Gholam. I am trusting you, too, Luca Valere. Don't prove me wrong."

***

He went to his cabin and sat on the bunk with a huff. In the corner leaned the old harpoon, the one he'd stolen from Valeris Palace's library months ago. Its rusted point looked even more battered in the shadows of the cabin, but the trace of whaleglass along its blood fuller lingered, brilliant as starlight.

Luca didn't reach for it. Its weight wasn't a comfort anymore. As a child he'd fit his small fingertips into divots along its shaft, worn by ancient whalers, and imagined what it must have been like to stand at the bow of a god-hunting ship. To throw the harpoon, watch its arc and the burst of radiant blue unfurling in the water. To cup the salt sea in his hands and drink godsblood, raw and teeming with power.

He knew what it felt like now. He remembered clenching the harpoon shaft, arm cocked back to throw. Cereza's corpse sprawled below him. The poison of rage and grief, vengeance pounding a hole in his heart.

The Leviathan was gone, its body disintegrated into the ocean. What if there was no way to bring it back? What if whatever it had given him was just an echo of its song, fading already?

Maybe this was faith, the belief he'd held so close for so many years. Hope, cruel and wounding, clung onto past all reason.

The Triune can take reason, Luca thought, and kicked himself upright and to his feet once more. He'd sworn he would make this right. He wasn't about to give up now.

He left the close heat of the cabin and made for the deck, Puppy trotting at his heels. Waves surged and hissed as the Fishcutter coursed ahead, toward the edge of the Great Blue and back into the charted waters of the Inner Sea. Isozi, the blue-skinned mercenary women sworn to Bateleur, and now to Atana, patrolled the decks, moonslight gleaming cobalt off their skin. Niive soared above, keeping the sails filled, so high she almost looked like an ordinary bird.

Curses and cheers and the ring of steel to steel pulled his focus. Lanterns illuminated the circle of pirates gathered near the mainmast. Steel flashed from within: a pair of fighters armed with sword and dagger, darting, circling, clashing. It took Luca a moment to recognize one of them as Sirin.

He hurried over as she whirled, nimble as a dancer, barefoot on the tarred planks. She wore clean shirtsleeves rolled to her shoulders, her grin bleached white by the moonslight. Her opponent was massive, easily twice her size and banded with muscle and monster tattoos, sea-orks rippling over his biceps and neck and barrel chest.

His braids whipped as Sirin struck out, a whirlwind of steel, feet scarcely brushing the deck. Steel clanged, a resounding bell warp; the crowd cheered as the big man stumbled back, blood spattering the deck from the fresh slash over one slablike pectoral, beheading one of his tattooed sea-orks.

"You're fast, witchborn," he panted. Sirin flashed him a grin and clanged her blades together. Luca ducked through the crowd of pirates and stood, watching. The big man gave Sirin a smile in turn, silver-capped teeth glittering. "But how tough?"

He moved; Sirin tensed, but she didn't react fast enough to avoid his fist. Dagger in hand, he cracked his knuckles into her face. She whipped to the side. An arc of her blood streaked the planks. His knee slammed into her stomach. Sirin tottered back, hunched, her weapons screeching against the deck, leaving scars in the wood.

"Figured Rostov would get her," muttered a toothless old woman, a salt granny dressed in fish skins. "He's a hale lad, that one."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Luca told her, settling back against the mast. "She's not half bad herself."

She cackled. "Just you wait, boy."

Coins clinked from hand to hand- bets, Luca guessed, in the currency of countless islands, square bronze coins stamped with crude images of shellfish, wafer-thin discs of abalone strung on knotted cords, gold coins heavy as stones and bearing the profile of some unknown regent.

"Bet you one of the gold ones she downs him," Luca told the salt granny.

She crowed again. "You're on, and a fool besides. I'm never wrong."

Sirin stumbled against the onlookers, and one pushed her back into the arena. Blood streamed from her split lip as Rostov paraded, blades held high, soaking up the cheers.

Sirin didn't move- but as Luca watched she lowered her head and closed her eyes. Darkness gathered around her feet, and Luca tasted a wash of magic, bitter as salt. The air surged- a strange thing, like wind with no source, a ripple of power. She lifted her head, and the shadows rose around her, a swirling, whipping column of darkness, Sirin's short hair dancing in the breeze.

Rostov whirled, but he was the slow one this time. Sirin's shadows shot toward him; he sprang to face her, but they snared him, wrapping his arms, his ankles, his throat in shadowy chains.

She made a fist and wrenched. The shadow chains twanged tight, flinging Rostov off his feet. He flew through the air and slammed again to the decks. The crowd stumbled back, eyes wide, gasps and curses flying like startled gulls. Sirin stared, rigid. Veins stood out against her skin, her face slick with sweat.

The chains tightened. Rostov let out a yelp, his hands splaying wide, fingers trembling. Luca tensed with a frown.

All at once she let him go. He slumped, his breathing harsh, his shoulders hunched. Pale welts covered him where her shadows had touched, stark against his red-brown skin. A ragged cheer rose from the onlookers. More money changed hands, pirates bearing Rostov to a canteen of whiskey and a censer of sweet kaffa.

"Guess you're wrong today," Luca told the salt granny.

She scowled and flicked him a coin; he caught it one-handed and winked at the old woman before turning to Sirin.

"Well done," he called.

She shivered, then seemed to notice him. She returned her weapons to a nearby pirate and strode over. Were you watching the whole time?

"Just waiting for you to win." He noticed the blood webbing down from her lip. "Are you all right?"

She didn't look it. Her eyes shone bright and wild. She hadn't stopped shaking, though the night was balmy. She'd called her shadows in the moonslight, like she had on the schooner, like she had in An Gholam, and even Luca could see what it took out of her.

More than all right. I feel...I feel stronger.

"You don't look stronger."

Annoyance flashed in her eyes. Did you come out here just to chide me?

"No, no, of course not. Listen."

He told her what he and Atana and Irene had discussed, and what he'd seen, the whaleglass inside the dead fish. Her expression didn't shift as he spoke.

An Gholam, she signed once he was done, and let out her breath. The last time they were there it was an inferno Spellfire and screams, Bateleur's blood on the stones. A temple, burning. A city calling for answers, for Azare's blood.

"I know, I know," Luca said. "But look. You remember the temple? The carvings in its lower levels? They were like the ones in the Aiatar temple, on the island. The monsters, the black stone. They weren't just similar, Sirin, they were the same."

What are you saying?

He pressed his hand to Puppy's head. "An Gholam was an Aiatar temple. I'm saying there could be answers down there. Answers about the Leviathan, about its nature, about whatever in all Hells happened to it. How we can make this bastard of a situation right again."

Sirin watched him as he spoke. They stood by the railing, far from the celebratory moil of the pirates, clapping Rostov's shoulder while he drank them all dry. Someone had found a lute and was playing it with considerably more skill than Matteo, the twanging notes rising desultory through the warm night breeze. Luca turned from them, out to sea. Here, the running lights gleamed cold green off the waves, the starlit road of the sea unmarred, an expanse of silver and black and deep, fathomless blue.

Luca felt a chill course through him, his pulse in his ears.

"There's so much I don't understand yet, so much I can't repair," he said. "But, by the Triune, I will." He gripped the railing near her hand. "We will. You and me. The Leviathan, and then the war. When we get back to Lapide, my mother-"

Sirin cut him off with a stare, sharp and black. I am not returning to Lapide.

"Sirin, I have to go back."

And if you do I am not going with you.

He stared at her, brow furrowed. She breathed with short, hard gasps, her pupils ringed in white, wisps of shadow curling from her skin. Her blood had crusted on her chin in dark rivulets. How would I return, anyway, Luca Valere? she signed, her movements jerky. As your prisoner?

"Triune, Sirin-"

She wasn't done. Her hands moved in flicks and spurts. Then how? As I left in chains, so I return-

He caught her wrists, and she stiffened. Her skin was icy, her shadows stinging his hands. He loosened his grip, his fingertips brushing the hard spur of bone at the joints. He felt the rush of her blood inside her, the rush of her power, heady as the air before a storm. Maybe that was just her effect on him.

"Sirin," he said again, softer. "No."

He released her wrists and examined her face, the drying blood, her split lip. Already it had begun to knit back together. She healed fast come night; her power was always stronger then, miraculous, some part of the cycle of sundown and moonrise, the great balance of all things.

"Come back with me," he urged. "There's a place for you, there, by my side. Lapide took your home, so let me give you one. Come with me, and belong-"

Cold hissed at his fingertips. He winced, and flinched back, and shadow curled between her skin and his fingers, thick and clinging. Sirin's eyes had darkened- no starlit reflections, nothing but light-drinking black, the tremble of her lashes and the glint of teeth between her lips. She advanced, forcing Luca a step back.

I have a place I belong, she signed. A black beach at the end of the world. You suggest I forget that? To sit with you and drink my people's blood from gilded teacups?

"No, of course not- Triune, Sirin-"

Shadow unfurled from her, smoky and dense, surrounding her in a diffuse column. Luca remembered the first time he'd seen her, a monster of darkness leaving a swathe of death behind her. Falcii dead and broken, his country sundered, his sister cowering in terror.

Sirin must have seen the fear in his eyes. Her brow furrowed, her jaw clenching tight. Is that what you want, Luca? Your lady monster, chained and toothless?

"No." He reached through her shadows and gripped her face, cupping it in his hands. "I only wanted-"

Her face twisted as he touched her, eyes dulling. She didn't see him, he understood in a snap. She saw past him, through him and into cold, blank horror. She snarled a silent scream, her throat-slit scar pale against her dark skin. Her hand snapped around Luca's arm; he had only an instant to jerk back before her hand tightened, her shadows too, veining under his skin and wrenching tight.

Cold shattered through his arm. He heard bone crackle; his vision pulsed red, then white, then darkness, sudden as a wave, taking the moonslight and the blanket of stars and sweeping them into nothingness.

Luca yelled and jerked away. The small of his back hit the railing as he clutched his arm. His skin was bleached pale where her shadows had touched him, a perfect imprint of her hand seared into his forearm. It throbbed- not broken, he thought, maybe a sprain- but that was scarcely his first concern.

Magic hung in the air, echoes of her power. She'd dropped her shadows, and stared at him, her eyes wide. Her hands, trembling, shaped his name.

Luca.

"What..." His voice sounded rough. The stars shone; had they blinked out before? He wasn't sure. His head swam. "What was..."

Luca, she signed again. She reached out as if to touch him, then whirled and fled. Shadows swarmed her, blurring her outline, and she melted into the darkness. Luca wanted to call out, but his voice felt crushed inside him, disbelief overwhelming pain or shock.

Fear, too. Of Sirin, and for her.

Balance, the Leviathan had whispered. Sirin was part of that balance, like all things. If Irene was right, and the natural order had been thrown off, then so had she.

So had her power.

Luca lifted his hand into the moonslight and flexed it, examining the pale welts Sirin had left behind. He still tasted her bitter power, the raw strength of it, unchecked and monstrous.

He'd felt it before, when he touched the crystal.

They felt just the same.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 36- Luca

***

Water filled this place, thundering underfoot, veining the walls and collecting in sunken caverns high in the temple, touched with traces of luminescent shimmer. Pale, blind cave fish of massive scale cruised through pools. Each fish was as long as he was tall, their barbels twitching as Luca leaned over to get a better look.

He and Sirin picked their way up narrow, winding steps, through caverns and over rubble. The witch seemed rapt, and Luca was rapt with her. This was a haunted place, full of relics as a grave-vault. Everywhere, traces lingered: jewelry, small carvings scattered in corners, nautilus shells and fragments of crystal and gilded scroll cases, their contents long since turned to dust. Armor lay in niches, dried brittle as paper, made of some scaled hide Luca did not recognize. It gleamed a deep, lightless black, and looked as if it had been molded with neither strap nor buckle, like a second skin.

Witch armor, he thought, with a thrill, made to fit over wings and accommodate the powerful back muscles necessary for flight. Witches- Aiatar- had never been more than solitary creatures in the stories. Powerful forces, but always lonely. This proved so much. They once had a society, a people, alive with powerful magic. What had happened to pull that society apart and turn its people into nomads at best, and myths at worst?

Charms hung from doorways, reminding him of the sailor's charms that begged favor from the Triune back home, crafted by those leaving for a long ocean voyage. He touched the strings of small bones and carved slivers of crystal, listening to their chime.

Not just crystal.

"Sirin," he whispered. "It's whaleglass."

She came to stand alongside him. He touched the crystals again, marveling at their iridescent glitter. "I've never seen shards of it before. It's impossible. Whaleglass doesn't break like this. Besides, no one would waste it on charms."

No one we know, Sirin said.

Luca remembered Grand Magister Tosca's words- that there was so little folk knew about whaleglass, about its secrets, and especially about the lost art of its shaping. Artifacts made from the stuff were precious rare, and all of them ancient, carved by the people of Rashavir, by ancestors and long-dead alchemists, by figures of legend.

Maybe they weren't legend. Rashavir had sundered and sunk by apocalyptic calamity, its exact nature lost to millennia. What might have sunk with it?

Such languages of magic must have been lost. Such words of knowledge that would never again be spoken.

All the while, the peak hung overhead. The sun moved, and so did its shadow, thrown long across the forests below. What did it mean? What did any of this mean? The not-knowing filled him, sent shivers up his nerves, set fire to his heart. He had to figure this out. If he didn't find what they'd come for, what the Leviathan's trail had led them to, Cereza would become another dead thing on the shores of this strange island.

Sirin stood by him, eyes lifted, watching the play of light through the whaleglass. He watched her in turn. Her dark skin shimmered with iridescent reflections, glow caught in her lashes. Her hair had begun to curl, a dense cap of black that covered the scars on her scalp.

She looked up, suddenly, and saw him examining her. Her brow creased- some confusion, maybe, or conflict.

"What?" Luca asked her, softly.

She faced him, and lifted her hands, her fingers still, as if unsure of what to say.

"Valere!"

The witch's voice rang through the cave. Luca turned from Sirin, his nerves still alight, his face warm, and followed the witch's voice down the passageway.

Steps led him down, deeper, back into echoing darkness. The faint glow of the water was enough to illuminate his way. Niches gaped in the walls, most empty, some full of dust. The steps spilled out into a lofty, circular cavern, water running into a round pool at its heart and filling the air with its glow. Witch statues ringed the room, backs to the walls, wings spread and interlocking, hands filled with crossed blades. Armored Aiatar, faces covered with avian helmets. They stared down at Luca and Sirin, at the sole witch in their midst.

The niches stood open, here, and they were not empty. Bodies lay beneath shrouds of dust, enclosed in enameled sarcophagi- four of them, one in each niche. Luca approached slowly. The mummy within was dried dark as varnished leather, lips drawn back from its teeth, eye sockets reduced to folds of desiccated flesh. It wore robes, their colors long since lost. Silver ornaments had fused with its skin, its black hair set in elaborate braids grown brittle with time. Its hands were crossed over its chest, and arcane tattoos patterned its visible skin, ink twins to the reliefs of monsters and divine figures carved across the temple walls.  

The nails were blunt and unclawed, the mummy's teeth flat. Luca narrowed his eyes. He went to the next mummy, and the next. At last he turned and looked back at the witch.

"They're human," he said.

The witch nodded. Her brow was furrowed as she picked loose and re-braided a strand of her hair, over and over. "They're all human."

"Witches- Aiatar- they buried humans here, in their tomb, in their temple-"

"No." The witch shook her head hard. "We do not consort with islanders."

"One of you must have, once," Luca said. He pointed at Sirin. "She's evidence enough of that. Where else would witchborn come from? And this...it looks like they more than consorted with us. They honored us."

He remembered the legends of Valeria, his ancestor, who in them had won her crown through fell magics thanks to the power of her witch-consort. He'd always figured they were more propaganda than truth, even as he wished otherwise. But what if they hadn't been? What if, once, Aiatar had been more than legends, more than cradle songs to sing in the darkness, more than dread and lonely monsters?

He traced the knob of the mummy's wristbone. Once, Aiatar had built this temple. Once, one of them had folded this human's hands over their heart.

A wild, terrible energy rose in him, a yearning so strong it felt close to madness. If only he knew more, maybe this place could unlock a way to break the curse, to end the war. To bring back- what? Some age long-since dead, when all things were in balance, when folk understood the ways of the Leviathan?

"We need to keep looking," he said. He turned from the tomb, toward the way out. "I know there are answers here."

There have to be, he thought. Cereza couldn't afford anything else.

The upper passageways were in ruins. Entire walls had sloughed away; statues stood headless and limbless. Reliefs were worn to shadows on the iridescent black stone, witch legends, maybe, lost to time. Flights of steps led to ornate monster-flanked doorways that opened into nothing. Birds circled beyond the crumbled walls, seeming to drift motionless on the high clear breezes. Wind sang down empty halls and past the horns and tusks of statues, filling the halls with strange music.

Here the sky was uninterrupted, and Luca felt the weight of the clouds. They pressed down on him, blue-gray and heavy. The air smelled of rain, smelled of storms, the sky darkening, though the sun still hung high. Here, too, the carvings seemed older, primordial, formless: eyes, and wings, and things that could have been fish.

Not fish, he realized with a shiver. Whales, like those in the deep heart of An Gholam, like the paintings in the depths of Valeris Palace. Countless whales, cresting, diving, curled fetal. Cresting again, diving again, dying. He walked through halls of Leviathans, walked through dozens of cycles, ending and beginning and ending again. The air shook around him. It tasted bitter as magic on his tongue.

Over all, the peak arched, that back-curve like a fin.

"It lives," Luca murmured, trailing his hands over the walls. "It falls. It dies."

The heights of the temple seemed barely structure at all, just spires of rock and remnants of statues. The uppermost point waited, a broken prow of temple wall. Luca looked down- mistake. Mist spun, birds wheeling below him, buoyed on warm updrafts. He clambered up, heard Sirin climb behind him, twice as fast.

He saw what he'd glimpsed from the beach, what had winked at them in the sunlight: a curved dish of crystal, fully a yard across and mounted in a circlet of black stone. A long glass, then- a primitive telescope. He ran his fingertip over one smooth edge. From here he could see nearly the whole of the island, the vast expanse of the sea, all the way to the horizon.

The day was clear. The sea spread under it, miles of open waves. The long glass took his gaze and cast it leagues away, made smears on the horizon clear, consolidated them into- shapes. More than shapes. Islands, like the one they stood on. Humped backs, ridges rising in the shape of fins. One, close by; another, some miles from that. A third, further still.

All the same shape, all with that fin ridge. All like the backs of whales, rising from the deeps, glimmering like godsglass in the noon sun.

Luca's heartbeat pulsed in his fingertips. His lungs felt constricted, a great hand reaching inside him to clench tight. He felt like he was looking not out but up, like the stars had been pulled aside and he was seeing beyond them, like he stood at some edge and stared into dark, and didn't know if it led to an abyss, or to freedom.

To fly, to fall.

Stars spun in his eyes, in his nerves, in his heart.

"They're Leviathans," he whispered. The islands out there, the island they stood on. "They're all Leviathans."

He understood. It was like stepping into that fathomless dark, and falling, and falling. There had been countless Leviathans, and this was the place where they had come to die. This sea was a graveyard of gods. Of the same god. To live, to die- that was the way of all things, and so it was the way of the whale too.

Nothing could live forever. Not even the Great Leviathan.

"It comes here, and turns to stone, and then is reborn again from itself," the witch murmured.

Luca turned to her. "And our Leviathan-"

The witch finished his sentence for him. "-Is coming, Valere. That's what led me here. I understand now. It's coming to die."

Luca's blood pulsed in his ears, heat behind his eyes, gripping his heart. The cycle can't be broken, Cereza had cried once, lost in a dream or a vision. Both, maybe. All things at once. All things made one. The world seemed to vibrate around him, heady and unfathomable, the past and the future colliding in the instant.

"No," he said. "I need to get to it first. I have to heal Cereza. If it dies-"

The witch pressed her lips together, as if fighting back some agonizing weight. She shook her head. "I...I know how much you care about her. I know how much you love her. But the cycle can't be broken. Do you understand? Nothing can interfere. Not you. Not even...not even to save her."

No.

Sirin stepped forward, her hands slicing the word from the air. She stared at the witch, her eyes blazing.

This cannot be the end of it, she said. This will not be the end of it. You said the Leviathan is coming here to die.

"Yes."

Then we will have to intercept it first, won't we? We'll hunt it ourselves. She glanced at Luca. Like heroes of old.

"You can't interrupt its death." The witch's voice shook. "It could change the cycle. It could damage it, stop its rebirth-"

Such a fragile god, Sirin signed with a curl of her lip. She pushed forward, but the witch stood her ground. Get out of the way.

"No."

"Sirin," Luca warned.

She ignored him, like he knew she would. I said get out of the-

With a shriek like a bird of prey, the witch threw herself toward Sirin. Wings burst from her back, driving Luca against the wall in their furious backdraft; talons sliced from nowhere, gleaming black and deadly.

Sirin caught her round the wrist before the blow could fall. Her fingers dug into the witch's wrist; her talons trembled, poised to slice into Sirin's eye.

"Sirin," Luca said. "Stop." He grabbed Sirin's shoulder. She stared at the witch, eyes wide and dark as jet, reflecting the gleam of her snarl. He felt the tension in her muscles, their unnatural cold. It stung his fingers, numbing him as coils of shadow twined around his fingers, leaving pale weals. He didn't let go.

Sirin twisted the witch's arm, slowly, to the side. Her fingers trembled; the talons retracted, melting again into pale flesh. Sirin let her wrist go, and she collapsed to her hands and knees, her breathing ragged, her long black hair falling around her face.

Sirin turned and strode away. Luca knelt at the witch's side. She clutched both hands to her belly, as if in pain. Luca examined her- she didn't look to be wounded. He touched her shoulder. Her head snapped up.

"What do you want, Valere?" she snarled.

"I'm sorry," Luca said gently. "But I have to save her."

The witch studied him. The gold in her eyes was vivid, bright with tears. "Destroyer," she whispered.

Luca stared at her for a long moment. Slowly he stood and followed Sirin, leaving the witch on her knees in the dust.

He caught up to Sirin at the base of the temple. She sat on the head of a temple beast, legs dangling over its beaked snout as she stared toward the horizon. Nagi perched alongside her, feathers the same blue-green as the pine needles, her wings half-furled as Sirin scratched under her neck feathers. Luca climbed the statue to the nape of its neck, then stood, harpoon set against stone, staring in the same direction.

"She likes you," he said. "She doesn't let just anyone do that."

Sirin opened her hand, showing Luca her palmful of fish scraps.

"Ah. Treats. So you've deciphered her."

Sirin turned to face him, sitting backward on the statue's head. Enough, she signed as Luca opened his mouth to speak. I don't want to be chided by you.

"I was going to thank you."

She made a face.

"We'll have to do this without the witch's help. We need to get back to Cereza."

I still hear those things howling down there.

Luca let out his breath and climbed alongside her, kneeling on the sun-warmed stone of the beast statue's head. Not stone, he reminded himself. Godsflesh, petrified by death. He spread his palm over the glossy black rock and closed his eyes, imagining the pulse that had once animated it, the blood rushing beneath its surface. All that power was gone, too, collapsed and reborn, made nothing, and everything, all at once.

Was each Leviathan the same, another life played out by one mind, over and over, since the beginning of all things? Or was it true death every time, a cessation of being, fear alleviated only by the knowledge that this death was necessary for new life to come?

Cereza had wept, in the ebb of her visions. Was the Great Leviathan afraid to die, too?

Dread echoed through him like the tolling of some ancient bell.

The color of the sky deepened to an ominous blue, storm clouds gathering. Luca tasted the damp, heavy air, the cold spear of wind flattening his hair back from his forehead, filling his lungs. "When this is done..." he started.

When this is done? When all these storms and squalls are past and we walk under clear skies, you mean? Foolish prince, assuming he'll get it all right.

"That's not very nice of you to say." He drew another breath of the storm wind. "I have to think of what might come after. The hope that I'm choosing right, that all things will work themselves out. Otherwise what's the point of this?"

Hope for a better world.

"Yes."

And you think there's such a thing?

"There has to be," Luca said. "I think you do, too. More than you say."

She tilted her head, surveying him. The sun lit her dark eyes. And this is the correct choice. Risk, and destruction, and all.

"Yes."

Sirin faced the coming storm. The sun sank in the sky, and the ocean turned gold. Nagi turned gold too as she threw herself onto the wind, spiraling down in a dizzying pirouette to meet the forest below. Luca no longer heard the mimiki.

They're gone, Sirin said. Let's move.

The forest darkened as they descended the mountain, trees silent, mist rising. By the time they reached the shoreline the sun had sunk nearly to the sea, dragging streaks of arterial red and vivid orange behind it, like some beast carrying its kill to the shore. The sea soughed and crashed beyond the breakers, tide rising up the beach. Luca glimpsed whitecaps, swells, their schooner cresting and falling as it rocked on the waves. No longer the calm seas of that morning. Was it the Leviathan, displacing the seas as it swam toward its grave?

He hurried into the cave, to Cereza's side. "Get up, Cee," he murmured, brushing her fringe from her forehead. She'd grown colder since he left, skin stiff and glittering. Now her other sclera had turned black, too, iridescence bleeding into the gray of her iris. "We're going to get this damn curse out of you."

Her lips fluttered. "Luca?"

"Is that you in there?"

"You...you were gone..."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm back, now. We have to go."

"Feel...cold."

"Not for long." He cupped the back of her head in his palm. "Did you hear us? The Leviathan is coming. We're going to see it, Cereza. You and me. Can you believe that?"

"Coming to heal me, is it?" A wry smile touched her lips. "I heard...I heard of a better way to heal me..."

"Oh?"

"Heard a witch's kiss can break any curse," Cereza said. "Wouldn't mind trying, just in the interest of experimentation..."

"Cee. Come on."

"With tongue."

Luca laughed, then pulled her to him, burying his face in her hair. Her arms wound around his shoulders, holding onto him. A jolt of fear lit his nerves. She smelled wrong, bitter as storm wind. She felt wrong, her arms too weak and too cold.

Fear turned hard inside him.

Save Cereza.

Kill the Leviathan.

The choice was already made.

He lifted Cereza. She felt lighter than before, lesser, wasted. He pressed his cheek to the side of her head as they left the cave. The wind tugged at him, clouds darkening, banks of pressure shifting high overhead. The storm was nearly on top of them. Soon the ocean would respond, waves rising to meet the sky.

At the horizon, lightning flickered.

The dinghy waited past the tidemark, where they'd left it. Sirin strode ahead, but Luca stopped a few yards off.

"The oars," he said. They were missing from the boat. "Where'd the oars go?"

Nagi keened overhead: a warning screech. Sirin whirled, flinging aside the supplies and dropping into a crouch. She raised her hands to sign.

Cold touched the back of Luca's neck.

"Careful, Highness," ordered a voice in Estaran. "That's your sister you've got there. Wouldn't want to drop her."

He recognized the clever, lilting voice, the cruel edge of it. Luca turned his head slowly, as much as he dared: enough to see the pistol barrel pressed into his neck, enough to see the halo of curling black hair and Ziva Lapin's grin.

"Got them, sir," she called.

Shadow darkened the sand. Luca faced front and looked straight into Captain Azare's eyes. He stood over Sirin, his own pistol against her skull, finger poised on the trigger. She knelt at his feet, head down, hands clenched on the sand. Witchhunters stepped from the mist, surrounding them, rifles aimed for him or for Sirin.

Azare twisted the barrel deeper, and Sirin winced, muscle flexing in her jaw as she grit her teeth.

"Strange, isn't it," Azare said. "No matter how far you run, it's never enough."

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 35- Sirin

***

Sirin vaulted over the side of the dinghy and into surf. It caught her legs to mid-calf, sun-warmed and thick with spume. The island loomed above, rising from a crescent of beach to the walls of shoreline cliffs, to forest, dense and blue-green. The upper ridge of the peak jutted above the mist, disembodied, like a floating island from some sun-addled sailor's tale. The morning light struck it, gilding its crags.

A thread of silver glimmered down its face. Water, maybe.

"Careful," Luca called as a wave slapped the side of the dinghy. He put out a steadying hand to Cereza, who huddled inside, wrapped in a ship blanket, eyes closed. Sirin didn't miss the slight tremble of Luca's fingers as he touched her wrist, as if to reassure himself she was still alive.

The dinghy rocked and jounced on the surf as Sirin and Luca pushed it to shore. Waves hissed, breakers thundering on outlying rocks. Light crept across the beach: powdery blue-gray sand rising to a line of stones, glistening as the light reached them. The shore jutted out in a headland a few hundred yards away, rock pools exposed by the morning tide. Cloud gulls swooped and called, flock twisting and belling, cries nearly lost over the rush of the surf. The dinghy keel scraped sand, and together, Luca and Sirin dragged it, and Cereza within, onto the beach.

Shadow rippled over the sand. The gulls scattered to the wind. The witch strafed by, feathers glowing a deep, iridescent blue in the sun. She called, the sound echoing long up the swoop of cliff and tree and mist, all the way to the distant face of the crag high above. She circled once more, then landed, transforming as she dropped, on human feet the moment she touched sand.

"There are caves at the tidemark," she called.

Luca didn't acknowledge her. He tried to lift Cereza; her head lolled against his shoulder, her face creasing with pain. Sirin pushed Luca aside and took Cereza, lifting her from the dinghy and following the witch up the beach.

The witch transformed again, lifting off with the boom of displaced air and a scatter of sand. Sirin climbed, barefoot, over the rocks, Luca hurrying behind her, hauling the gear they'd brought from the schooner. The ship itself was anchored past the breakers, shimmering in the veils of mist creeping down from the forest. Strange calls echoed from the trees- tall, narrow pines, Sirin made out, with clouds of blue-green needles. She saw nothing amongst them, nothing but more mist, and shadow, dense and slanting.

A prickle passed over her skin. Alkona had had a way of making her feel watched- the lonely crags, the way the wind sounded like music when it winnowed through the rocks. This place was the same. The hush seemed tense, like a skin of clear water on the surface of a waterfall.

If she felt that way, so did the witch. She was in her human form by the time Sirin and Luca made it to the mouth of the cave. Its interior was dry, tunnel extending some ten meters back. Wind breathed and soughed, currents brushing Sirin's face as she ducked in, carrying Cereza to the end. She lay her down on a flat spot of cave floor, propping her up on the wall so she might stay upright.

"How is she?" Luca asked, heaving their supplies down in a pile.

Sirin knelt by Cereza's side. Her eyes flickered behind her lids, like a restless dreamer. Her whispers were inaudible now, just a constant susurrus of sound. Sirin took her wrist, but felt nothing past her too-fast pulse.

She shook her head.

I don't know.

"The wound," Luca said. He knelt on Cereza's other side. "I need to see it."

Sirin gently pulled aside the blanket and twisted free the buttons at Cereza's throat. The veins extended up her neck and cheek, twisting round her neck like a garrote. Like a garrote, too, they constricted, tightening around her throat and cutting off her breathing. They felt like ice under Sirin's fingertips, hard and glimmering- crystalline. Not blood, but something else, a growth of whaleglass made deadly and poisonous.

She heard Luca's sharp inhale as she smoothed aside Cereza's collar, exposing the wound. A dark, tumorous mass pulsed under the surface of her skin. The split itself was crusted over with a scab of prismatic crystal. A starburst of veins radiated outward and bruised her skin with iridescence. The skin around the wound was pale, hard, so cold it burned Sirin's fingertips.

"Her heart," Luca murmured. "It's in her heart."

Sirin looked down, throat tight. She quickly buttoned Cereza's collar again and turned away, going to the pile of supplies.

She needs water, she signed as she rummaged. Need to keep her strong.

"Sirin."

Do you have night-drop here? She found a surgeon's kit, phials of night-drop and bitter asphael, staunchmoss dried into hard cakes. We need to keep the pain away.

"Sirin."

She stopped, drawing a long breath.

"You might have held the knife, but this wasn't you," Luca said. "This isn't your fault."

Then whose is it, Valere?

"This is..." She heard him shift, heard the scrape of his hand through his hair. "Too many," he muttered. "Too long."

Sirin didn't look at him. She found water and tin cups, mixed night-drop in, and handed the cup to Luca. Cereza drank, and Sirin watched, arms folded as she crouched against the far wall of the cave. At last Cereza's shudders and whispers faded, and she sank into what seemed like some kind of peaceful sleep. But there were always dreams, and Sirin knew what cages those could be.

"That won't slow the curse," the witch said. Sirin snapped round. The witch stood a few yards away. She hadn't heard her approach. "It will only ease the pain."

"Get out," Luca muttered.

The witch narrowed her eyes. "Valere-"

"I said get out," Luca said. "Stand guard, if you want to be useful."

The witch stared down at him for a long time, then turned and left, as silent as she'd come. Sirin saw her shadow shift and expand on the sand outside, and then that was gone, too.

Luca pushed past her, taking the harpoon from where it leaned on the cave wall. Luca, Sirin signed. Luca.

He didn't notice her. With a spurt of annoyance, Sirin clapped hard. He looked back at her. Don't goad her, Sirin said. She couldn't have known.

"Leave me something to be angry about, won't you?"

Where do you think you're going?

"To find more water. Fresh food. See if there's anything on this island that's going to kill us. Something like that."

You want to run away.

"Come with me or don't. I don't particularly care."

And leave the witch guarding Cereza?

"She seems capable of defending her. And she couldn't have known," Luca echoed. "Isn't that right?"

He walked away, out onto the sand. Sirin followed him, grabbing her boots. The sunlight fell over her, heavy as a cloak, holding her power hostage.

She shook off the ripple of nausea. Luca.

He saw her now and stopped, jabbing the end of the harpoon into the sand like a walking-stick. "What."

You can't always run from what wounds you. Not when it lives inside you.

"What would you have me do?" he said. "Watch her die and do nothing? I betrayed my country, my own family, so that wouldn't happen. Or did you forget? I'm the reason she's here. I'm the reason she's going to die on this Triune-forgotten rock instead of holding our mother's hand, at home, safe and unafraid."

His grip tightened around the harpoon shaft. "She might have chosen to come with me, but only because I gave her that choice. Do you understand, Sirin?"

Sirin watched him as he spoke, his shoulders hunched in, his salt-stiffened hair lifted by the breeze. Not the gilded, painted prince she'd seen for the first time drowned in moonslight. Not the son of Lapide standing on the free side of a cell while she knelt in chains at his feet. This was a man wrung out. New scars, and badly-shaven stubble, and the weight of exhaustion in his eyes. His hair needed a cut, and a wash. His broken nose was like a mustache painted on a marble statue: it made mockery of his beautiful face.

How much more real he seemed now, how much more alive. And how much more beautiful because of it.

I'll come with you, Sirin told him. Find water. Find whatever it is you're looking for, that you think will save you.

He nodded.

But only because you would die without me.

Luca laughed and shook his head. He began up the beach. "Then you'd better stay close."

***

They searched the headland, a long tide-licked stretch of stone and rock pools, teeming with small fish stuck until the sea returned, with spined things clinging to rocks, with sea-grass like vivid purple hair, rippling with phosphorescence. Crustaceans flit and scrabbled, long feelers twitching as they hid amidst clusters of anemones bristling with spikes. Cloud gulls squabbled over the corpse of a dead crab fully the size of a small child, its shell thick as armor and crusted in barnacles.

The stink of sun-warmed low tide rose off the headland, mixed with the clear slap of sea wind. While Luca bent over a rock pool, gathering mussels, Sirin climbed a crag to get a better look at the island.

The thread of silver along the peak seemed brighter, now, sun higher in the sky. It seemed half-ghost, invisible one moment, visible the next: a spectral torrent falling into nothingness from the peak's heights.

"I don't know if these are poisonous or not," Luca called. "I suppose the witch might- what are you looking at?"

Sirin pointed. Luca climbed up alongside her, squinting. "A waterfall?"

Might be.

"Can't have a waterfall without water." He climbed off the rock, tying his net bag of mussels so it dangled in the rock pool, keeping them fresh until he could come and collect them. "Come on."

Sirin paused. Luca looked up at her. "What is it?"

This place. Can't you feel it? She shook her head. Watching. Rising. Waiting. Something knows we're here.

"The Leviathan?"

Sirin didn't answer. She cast a last look at the peak, then climbed down after him.

The headland sloped up a gentle incline of flat stones, becoming thin, dark soil, becoming forest, pines clinging to the skin of soil with long, whiplike networks of roots. Up here, the heat of the beach dulled, becoming temperate, muggy and thickly scented with pine. The mist crept over Sirin; she shivered, relishing the cool air, respite from the unrelenting sun. Rock shelves jutted from the ground, great terraced ridges supporting their own sapling growths, so they seemed like miniature aerial forests of their own. The pines were all angled upslope, a forest molded by the wind off the Great Blue, their trunks narrow and scaled in silvery bark. Their branches were sparse, furred in airy clouds of blue-green needles, long and flexible as feather plumes.

The needle litter on the forest floor released a bitter sap scent as Sirin trod on it. She carried her boots, but was loath to put them back on. The give of needle litter, of soil, of living things and rotting- it was Alkona again, closer to home than she'd felt in so many long years.

Mist wended through the forest, obscuring its span. When the breeze blew, the trees rocked, an eerie groan carried down from the island's heights. Birds burst from the mist, and Luca spun to watch them go: a pair of long-necked herons, dusky purple streaked with black. His eyes traced their descent,  long legs tangling, beaks clattering in midair, before they separated again to sail like twin kites, lost over the expanse of the ocean. The shallows glowed vibrant turquoise, rippling with whitecaps, the breakers darkening to stormy blue. Past them, where the schooner was anchored, the sea settled on blue to the horizon, so vivid it ached to look at.

"Triune," Luca panted. He leaned against a tree, eyes half-closed. "Look at this place."

Sirin wrinkled her nose. Too hot for me.

"Are you serious? It's perfect."

Sirin smirked and turned her gaze back toward the ocean. Perhaps he had a point. The quiet, the birds. No souls to cloud the air. Nothing but the sea, and the sky, and when night came, a universe of stars.

The trees became taller as they pushed upslope, the air cooler. Pines hushed and creaked, gusts of wind channeled down from the cloud-streaked sky. Sirin caught glimpses of the sun, but the mist was too thick for more; it crept, it hung in veils. The sound of birds was lost on the lower slopes, the cloud gulls dispersed. Mist closed over the canopy, and the sound narrowed to the crunch of Sirin's feet against needle litter and twigs, the sound of her own breathing. Her power twined under her skin, reflexive.

She cast a glance around, back, but saw nothing: nothing but pines and rock shelves and mist, and their trail, winding behind them downslope.

"Sirin," Luca breathed.

He'd gone rigid. Sirin stopped, dropping into a crouch. A sound gibbered past: a spurt of nonsense, like words cut into chum. Sirin's gaze flicked to where it had begun, but nothing moved, nothing but drifting mist.

A stick snapped, loud as a breaking finger. Luca swung toward it, harpoon lowered. Sirin caught movement, a hunched shadow clinging to one of the pines: there, and then at once gone again. Another string of chum-words streaked past, a yowl like a laugh, almost human, not quite.

Sirin's pulse hammered. Her power flexed again, too weak to emerge. She clenched her teeth, searching the mist.

Eyes glimmered back at them: from rock shelves, from trees, wide and staring. Green, like night birds' eyes, and the flash of bared teeth. Grins, and hands clinging to the pines. One of the things leaped overhead, from one tree to another, and Sirin glimpsed it: no larger than a child, long-armed, humanlike hands and handlike feet and a long tail flying behind it. It scrambled into the canopy and crouched, enormous round eyes and grinning fangs, purple-black fur, short claws digging into the bark.

It spewed a string of gibbering sounds at them, drew back its lips, and hissed.

"Go!" Luca shoved Sirin upslope. He didn't have to tell her. She sprang into a sprint, dragging Luca behind her. Shrieks chased them, like children screaming, winding and echoing through the pine barrens. The trees became full of pendulous movement, creatures leaping, scrambling, diving after them, near-silent save for the scrape and scree of claws in bark, hisses and gibbering and triple bursts of screams, like a signal cry- Sirin didn't know. Cold sweat trickled down her back; she weaved through trunks, around rocks, hairpin turns, her bare feet scraping sharp stones. Movement erupted to her right: one of the creatures flinging itself down from a tree, gape-jawed, massive blunt canines aimed for her neck.

The harpoon came from nowhere, slicing inches over her shoulder and into the creature's sternum. It screamed- the sound pierced Sirin to the marrow, earth and sky, that was the sound one of the other children had made as the slaver's bolt found her leg- and collapsed. Blood slicked the needle litter. Ahead, mist drifted, and Sirin spun to a halt seconds before she went over a cliff edge and into nothingness.

"No," Luca rasped.

The horde of creatures was coming, tearing through the trees, up the slope. Sirin hazarded a look over the edge. Jagged rocks waited at the bottom, sand and washing waves. Fifty feet down: a broken leg, a broken neck. She edged back. The wounded creature thrashed, clutching at its wound. It made a sound like weeping.

Backward, Sirin signed. Over the edge.

"No! Are you insane?"

Better than being mauled.

Luca jabbed the harpoon at one creature, another; the hisses sharpened to snarls, endless eyes glittering. There had to be a dozen at least- Sirin couldn't tell. She edged back again, one heel suspended over the cliff.

A shadow rippled over the sun as a shriek split the air. Sirin looked up as dust scattered into her eyes: the witch. She'd half-transformed, so she seemed like one of Luca's Triune, a girl with the wings of a vast black bird. The creatures flinched back, snapping at the witch as she hung in midair, her wingbeats thrashing the pines.

"This way." The witch dropped, folding her wings; they vanished into a swirl of down as her feet touched the ground. One of the creatures lashed out at her; Sirin heard the witch's cry of pain, smelled blood on the stones.

"And hurry!" she added, slashing at the creatures in turn. "Before the mimiki get any fresher."

Sirin grabbed Luca and pulled him, flinging him ahead of her. He yelled in alarm, maybe expecting to go over, that she'd gone mad in earnest and decided to toss them both over the cliff. The witch spun and ducked into the mist, into a narrow cleft between two rock shelves. With her gone the mimiki horde descended, howling, beating at their chests, at the trees, on the ground; claws scrabbled at Sirin's back, but she slipped into the cleft and out of their reach.

She glanced back. The horde had retreated, staring after her. Some surrounded the wounded mimiki, stroking its fur, lifting it like she'd lifted Cereza, carrying it away. The passage turned, and they were gone.

It was some time before anyone spoke.

"F...forgive me," Luca said. "Not that I'm ungrateful-"

"Then shut up."

Luca blinked. "I'm sorry-"

"I said quiet," the witch spat.

Luca shut up. Sirin might have smirked at him under other circumstances, but her pulse still hammered, her nerves alight. It wasn't the danger- she was used to that by now- but the sounds the things had made, the screams. Children, dying. The massacre on the beach was a memory she knew would never leave her, would remain at the core of all memories, like a grain of sand in an oyster forming a layer of nacre.

There was no ridding herself of it. Those screams had shattered the nacre of time that had formed around her memories, had reduced it to sand again, had reduced her to a child running through red surf, praying that if she could not get away, she at least had time to drown before the slavers caught her.

The witch stopped in front of a sheer wall of rock. Pines grew along its upper ramparts, thirty feet or more above their heads.

"Dead end," Luca panted. His voice still sounded unsteady. "Guess we can wait them out. Unless you'd like to fly us to the beach."

"Can't."

"What do you mean, can't?"

The witch's wing unfurled from her back. Sirin watched the transformation, feathers bristling, muscle bunching beneath pale skin. Wondrous- or, it should have been; the witch's wing shuddered, clearly with pain. A pair of pinion feathers had been ripped from the wing's lower edge, surrounding plumage torn askew. Dark blood dripped to the stones.

Her teeth set, the witch folded her wing once more.

"Can't," she repeated. "Not until I heal."

"How long is that going to take?"

The witch didn't reply. She stared at the cliff face, palms hovering over the stone.

"All right," Luca said with a shrug, clearly feigning calm. "I suppose this is as good a place as any to wait. What were those things? You called them mimiki?"

The witch said nothing.

"Well. Anyone got a pack of cards?" Luca went on.

"Hush," the witch said. She took a long breath. The wind seemed to stir around her, dust particles winking in the shafts of sunlight. They looked like stars when they caught in her black hair. "I remember this place. It's like a half-forgotten dream."

Sirin narrowed her eyes. Have you been here before?

"Maybe. It's been so long since I've seen another of my kind." The witch moved her palms over the stone, never making contact with its surface. "Not since I was a child, and my mother..."

She drew a short breath. "We were great once, you know, we Aiatar."

"Aiatar?" Luca echoed the word.

"What, you thought we call ourselves witches? You islanders, thinking you made the first names of things." Her tone became rapt, as if retelling a tale she'd heard a hundred times. "We were warriors. Scholars. Alchemists. We had great power, and none dared to capture us, or chain us, or make us swear to ferry them across the sea like beasts of burden. We commanded the storm. I've heard songs of Aiatar who could harness lightning itself, who could pale the stars with its fire."

A smile lit her face, pure and so full of longing Sirin felt its ache in her heart. It faded, and the witch's expression clouded again.

"That was what my mother told me, anyway," she said. "A long time ago. But this place..."

She set her knuckles against the cliff face and pushed. Stone ground on stone, and a split appeared in the cliffside, revealing a narrow passageway into the rock.

"I suppose you remembered where that was, too," Luca said nonchalantly.

The witch cast him a hawkish look. "In."

Luca ducked inside at once. Sirin lingered, looked back, and followed.

The passage cut upward through the rock, a natural cave with steps chiseled into the slope. Sirin ran her hand over the edges of the doorway. There was no mechanism, no gears nor locks. There was simply black stone, giving way under the witch's hands.

Another chill passed through her.

They climbed for long silent minutes until the passageway belled open into a series of caverns. They seemed a place dreamed into form, stalagmites like ork tusks joining to the ceiling, forming pillars as massive as any Sirin had seen in Estara's grand cathedrals. The stone was slick, reflective black, smooth as glass and shot through with veins of iridescent quartz. Their reflections climbed with them, echoes rising to plash off the distant cavern roof.

The breeze channeled down from above, bringing with it the scent of cool, clear sea wind. Sirin heard water, though she couldn't see it.

The steps opened to the sky: a cave mouth, looking out and over the side of the ridge itself, a plunge of gleaming black to the canopy far below. A terrace was built between the edge of the natural cliff and the drop, made from blocks of black native stone and crumbling railings. With a pang, Sirin recognized the style. Bateleur's temple, An Gholam- it was the same, dense with carvings, sea creatures and many-eyed, many-winged gods, a pair of hawk-footed lynxes guarding the terrace. They stared out across the sea, blank eyes and bared fangs pitted by centuries of salt wind.

"Triune," Luca breathed, scrambling to the terrace.

A temple was built into the mountainside. This was only its foot: above, it was carved straight onto the cliff itself, hidden by a rock fold so it had remained invisible to them as they'd approached by ship. The ghost torrent arced into spray, spackling Sirin's face with cool mist, colors rippling through the water. Spires, and bas-reliefs, and arcades all of arches and columns clung to the mountainside, anchored deep in the black rock.

The peak towered overhead, a back-bent mountaintop like some vast fin, trailing down into a ridge.

The back of an enormous whale, Sirin thought, like she'd thought when she saw the island from their sea approach.

She felt her power shift inside her. It was stronger than before, a heave like a breaking swell. Darkness danced in her eyes. She took a sharp breath, steadying herself.

"This place..." Luca was saying. "There's something about it. Something strange. The compass doesn't settle. It feels like...like a place adrift."

"A warp in the world, that's what this island is," the witch murmured. "Or maybe it's the eye of the storm that is the world, and all things are one here. Like the Leviathan is one with all, because it is all..."

"Witches made this, didn't they?" Luca said. His voice was hushed, reverent. "This place...An Gholam. They're all Aiatar temples."

The witch nodded slowly. She seemed as wary as Sirin felt, yet she recognized the look in her eyes. She was overwhelmed, surrounded on all sides by the world she'd come from, the world she'd lost. A child of diaspora, of a way of life consigned to the past, a way of life she never had a chance to know. A dream, like she'd said. Half-forgotten.

I will never forget Alkona, she vowed. Never.

"And there are answers here," the witch said. "Whether we like it or not." She lifted her head. Sirin knew where she was looking: at that whaleback peak, crowned with seabirds. She felt again the surge of power, heady and strange. There were answers here. Whether they were good, or bad, they were still answers.

She moved past Luca, past the witch, toward the steps. After a moment, Luca followed. He glanced at her, but she just shook her head.

Whether we like it or not, she thought with a chill.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 39- Sirin

***

Dark sky, dark water.

On Alkona she'd memorized the voice of the ocean, how it hissed and thundered when it was angry and whispered when it was calm. She'd known it like a friend- the song of the tides, the dangerous currents twining around its coastlines and through its caves. Its hiss, its pulse, such that could be felt with eyes closed and feet bare against rocky shore, against black sands. The scent of it, cold and clean and sharp, mist rising from its waves soft as a lullaby.

This ice had a voice of its own- the great heave and groan of it, the deep rumbling cracks it made as the ship's prow parted broken-up floes. Its subsonic shift was almost imperceptible against her senses save for the grind of the hull against it when the ship coursed too close. It spread away and away: a vast plane of gray and white riven with seams of black seawater. Spray hissed through the seams with a rhythm like breath. All seemed drowned of color, but where it had split, the exposed ice was blue as gemstones, blue as whaleglass, frozen for a thousand years, never to thaw until the end of the world.

Amazing, Luca would have said. He'd be right, too. It was beautiful in its way.

Sirin glanced at Puppy, curled under the ship's wheel. The shadows left a circle around it, a clear patch of wood where the little god lay, shivering. Its blue-and-gold eyes ever watched her, full of terror and concern.

What do you want? she signed to it.

It blinked, tucking its chin to its paws, not breaking its stare.

Don't look at me like that.

It whined softly.

Sirin tore her gaze from it, focusing once more on the horizon, and on the unbroken concentration her magic took.

She had never gone so far before. Shadows gripped her. Power streamed from her, radiating in pulses. It wreathed the ship, so the vessel seemed remade in that living darkness, ever-shifting and slithering in and around and over itself.

It whispered like waves, like voices too distant to hear.

Sirin herself was a pillar of shadow on its deck, no longer human-shaped but diffuse, like her edges were dissolving into black smoke. The ship was her instrument; she manipulated it with a languid ease, like a lucid dream.

All felt like a dream.

She saw the ice around her, the crags of black rock jutting from the deeps and into the sky, blurred by the constant coursing billow of the blizzard higher above. She saw that sky, storm-dark and howling. She saw deeper, too, her memories breathing through her with each pulse of her power, as if it dredged them up, hoisting them from the pits of her hand over hand, and like that they became alive again.

She saw Luca, in those dreams: his face, the love in his eyes. She felt that love like pain.

It would have been you, she told him, again and again.

It would have been.

It would have been-

But what was belonging? He will always be afraid of you, Sirin, she told herself. They all will. You will never be forgiven. You will always be something to fear.

She was a child, huddling in the cave. Grave-dolls stared down at her from the walls, and in her hands she clutched another. It was unfinished- no wreath of seaweed and sisi blossoms, no chips of shell for eyes.

Who is that for? her grandmother whispered- but it was not her there, it was nothing but the dark, the grave-dolls, the slavers.

Who is that for? It was her own voice, the one she thought in, and dreamed in, the one she remembered having before her throat was opened and her blood spilled.

Is it for you?

It's not your time to end-

Firelight flared, and she heard the screams, the rough shouts in a tongue foreign to her. She cowered back. The grave-doll clattered from her hands.

He was there in the dark. He took her hands and held them. It's all right. Luca's gray eyes glinted, like shell. I can help you, I can save you. His hands were slick with blood. He smoothed them over her braids, smearing them wet and reeking. I love you-

I love you, she whispered.

Come back with me.

You can forget-

No, no-

You will forget.

He smiled at her, full of love and relief.

Don't you think it's time? His hands closed over her throat, and she felt the cold of the knife in them, and opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out but blood. She was choking on it, drowning in it. The surf rushed in; it dashed over her, soaking through her woolen cape and chilling her to the skin. She screamed, but she was just a child, and the nets were too strong for her-

"Don't you think it's time?"

That voice, again. Her voice. She lifted her head and saw her- the Sirin from before, the Sirin she might have been, standing in the darkness.

It's never time, Sirin told her. I'm not strong enough.

"But you can be," she said. "You will be."

It hurts, Sirin said.

"I know."

I loved him. She drew a shaky breath. I loved- it. Who I was, how I felt, when I let go of this and let myself see the world for what it is. All the wonders I was blind to for so long. I don't want them to be afraid. I don't want to be afraid-

Cold hands touched her face, her shorn hair, tracing her scars. She looked into her own eyes and saw her own sorrow, reflected again and again until it seemed like it was more her substance than all else.

How long had she been afraid? More than half her life. Each year she survived was a year longer than she'd had with her homeland. Sometimes her memories of Alkona seemed like a kind dream too, a vision she'd made up in chains to coax her to sleep, to coax her to wake, to keep her on her feet as she walked along the edge of some faraway cliff, ever thinking how easy it would be to throw herself over.

Why did you live, Sirin?

Why did you not end it?

She'd wanted to. So many times, so many days. You could be done, Sirin, this could be over. Was it her stronger, sharper reflection whispering to her? Was it the Leviathan? Was it herself? She didn't know. Maybe there was no difference.

More, and more.

The darkness churned around her. Cold hands gripped her, cold arms folded over her. She sank into them, and to her knees, holding on before she fell into the storm of her shadows and was lost. Dense braided hair pressed to her cheek, the patterns of the intricate plaits as familiar as a lullaby. The other Sirin's hands stroked her hair, rhythmic and calming, like her grandmother had done when she couldn't sleep.

"You're better alone," she murmured. "You always were."

She ran ahead of the other children, their blood in the waves. They'd fallen, they'd called her name, they'd begged her to help them, and she kept running.

I wanted it so badly.

"Wanting isn't needing," she said. "I need you. They need you: all those you couldn't save. All those crying out in the dark, waiting for you."

The screams grew louder, and the smell of smoke became unbearable, burning her throat raw. The other Sirin's hands gripped tighter, clutching fistfuls of her curls. "You abandoned them then. Don't abandon them now."

It wasn't my fault-

Her eyes were full of sorrow. "It was, Sirin. All of it was. The blood, and the fire, and the death of everyone you knew and loved. You didn't save them. You didn't even save yourself. Look at you, Lady Monster. You brought that death upon them as much as the slavers. You've always been a destroyer."

With a fingertip she traced Sirin's scar, her oldest scar, the one that crossed her throat. "Now become the worst of them, and make right what was done."

You were a child, Luca whispered, his eyes soft in the moonslight. But his voice was far away, one of many in the whispers that surrounded her.

The cold hands withdrew, and Sirin saw herself, powerful, vengeful, haloed in shadow as she stood at the peak of a rock crag.

"Find me," she called, and was gone in a swirl of snow.

Impact rammed through her.

Sirin gasped, stumbling free of her dreams as the ship jagged hard to starboard, bow rising with the screech of breaking wood. Her teeth panged together, just short of snapping off her tongue. Lanterns shattered; crates tumbled past, smashing holes in the railing as they careened over the sides. She struck the ship's wheel and grabbed on before she went over with them.

The ship shuddered around them, water sloshing over its side and flooding across the deck. Puppy let out a frightened yelp, fur stood on end, its short claws hooked deep into the deck. Sirin felt the entire vessel list, the deck tilting sharply to port, reared on its keel like an out-of-control elk.  Wood groaned beneath her, and she heard it split with an explosive crack.

The hull. She'd hit something.

Earth and sky, Sirin thought with a snarl.

She released the wheel and paced to the bow, vaulting easily onto the bowsprit. It thrust out into nothingness, as if standing to impale the low-hanging clouds, its lines and leading-lantern fused stiff with ice. She peered down into the seam of black water below. Ice floes rocked on the waves, but as they cleared she saw where the warship had been struck. It rode a ridge of dark rock, jagged and scarred, pocked with barnacles. The ridge jutted above the waterline, biting deep into the warship's hull.

Sirin narrowed her eyes.

That wasn't rock. That was shell.

The water vibrated, like a drumhead struck from beneath. Sirin's shadows withdrew from the ship, leaving the wood brittle and bleached, remnants of darkness curling from the ruined vessel like smoke. The shadows surged around her, swirling into form, making her twice, thrice her size. The waves frothed below: something massive turning over underwater. Wood shrieked as the ridge scraped free. Currents swirled as a vast webbed foreclaw raked through the sea, sheathed in scale the same dirty-white-streaked black as the frothing waves.

Teeth flashed in the weak sunlight: rows of them parting inside jaws the size to cleave through masts in a single bite. Sirin glimpsed the ice tortoise's eyelid, folds of crusted flesh, as it rose to just beneath the surface.

It opened, first the lid, then a veined membrane, sliding back from its eye: huge, and milky-white, webbed with pale blue cataracts. It stared up at her, the gray circle of its pupil shrinking as it focused, taking her in.

Sirin clenched her fists, and her shadows blossomed outward, kissing the waves. She sensed a great, slow intelligence in the depths of the tortoise's eye. She sensed a recognition, and with it, a pulse of fear.

How long have you been down there? she thought. How long has it been since you've tasted power like mine?

The eye stared at her for a heartbeat, for two- then slid closed. The water shuddered, glassing as the great tortoise turned over again, diving deeper, away from her power.

Away from her.

They will always be afraid of you, she thought, and lifted her face to the sky. The ship was wrecked, useless. Besides, she was close. She didn't need a ship, not anymore.

Puppy whimpered as she heaved the creature into her arms. It pressed its head into the crook under her jaw. She felt its shiver like it was her own, the faint warmth of its rough tongue as it gave her a lick, as if trying to reassure her, even now.

Sirin's heart felt as raw as her throat.

She gathered herself, and leaped.

Shadow streamed behind her as she dived through the air, wind like knives on her face. She cleared the water with ease and landed, silent, on the ice.

Deep inside, her heartbeat felt like blows, her muscles shaking, but the strain was distant. It didn't matter anymore. Sirin pressed her palm to the ice and felt the answering pulse, stronger than ever. Snow fell in fine veils around her, dusting her lashes, collecting on her hair and shoulders. She took a deep breath, savoring the burn of power that seared down her throat.

I'm coming, Sirin thought.

She straightened, holding Puppy tight, and without a look back at the abandoned ship she began to run, leaving a line of footprints in the snow behind her.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 36- Luca

***

They carried Puppy in turns, cradled in arms, passing it with care from hand to hand. Now, Luca held the little sleeping creature. It snuffled at his ear, and he leaned his chin against its head, winding his fingers deeper into its fur, savoring the rhythm of its breathing.

The air thinned as they climbed, scraping at his lungs. Sanjorra's lights, the white flare of the Falcii's ork-oil lamps, even the running lights of the navy ship anchored far below in the bay- all faded into the mist. Within an hour they were gone altogether, and the mountain became an island of white rock spearing into the stars. Only the storm was visible, the Leviathan's lightning omnipresent and inescapable.

Niive had flown them half the way, but now they ascended on foot, searching the mountainside for any sign of a cave. It made for a desolate landscape in the moonslight, bleached colorless. Sparse trees grew from clefts in the stone, their bark reddish and scaled, their needles long and curved. A spectral place, silent and strange, the hush so deep and the forest so still the slightest flicker of movement seemed amplified tenfold. They hadn't spoken much on the ascent, and Luca knew why. He felt why.

This place was charged, was holy. Here, Valeria had walked. Here, Valeria had come- from what? And why? Had she died up here, with only the stars as company? Or was she preserved, alive, waiting for them? He imagined her as he always had, clad in feathered armor, with waves of golden hair and eyes as silver as her blade. A conqueror-queen, a tricksome commander, she who had plunged into the trenches of deep magic and yet not drowned. Would she know them if she saw them, and would she have his answers?

"You think Bell is all right?" Cereza asked.

"I'm sure she's fine," Luca said. "Takes more than a little water to put our Isabella down."

"Those traitorous rockfish," Niive muttered, casting a dark look in the direction of the village. "I can't believe they'd sell us out like that."

"It wasn't their fault," Cereza said. "They were scared." She glanced sidelong at Sirin, who walked apart, her gaze downcast, her expression unreadable. "Are you scared?"

"Me?" Niive said. "Why...why would I be scared?"

"The truth isn't easy," Cereza said, slipping her hand over Niive's.

Niive smiled a little. "You make it easier," she murmured, and Cereza leaned her head to her shoulder.

Luca jolted to a halt. Puppy stirred in his arms, opening its eyes. He gently let it down. "Wait. Everyone stop."

He heard it again in the silence.

Bells?

No. Crystal chiming on crystal.

Whaleglass.

He scrambled up the incline, Sirin at his heels. The mist thinned, and a shape loomed from the night: a rock shelf chiseled with steps. Luca's mouth was dry as he hurried up, as he stood panting on the shelf, staring at the cave mouth beyond.

It was small, no more than a cleft in the rock, and sealed; stones filled it. A shard of whaleglass hung over the cave mouth, chiming in the breeze. Luca drew closer, reaching to let it run through his fingers.

The shard slipped into his hand as he touched it, tugged loose from its moorings. Luca turned the crystal over in his palm. It was strung on fine braids, plaited from black hair.

"Aiatar hair," he murmured.

"So they would never decay," Niive said.

Luca tucked the strand into his pocket and faced the sealed cave. Centuries of lichen crusted the stones. Those would take effort to move.

"Sirin?" he asked. "Would you-"

She lifted her hands. Dust plumed as her shadows filled their seams, and the entryway crumbled, stones disintegrating into gravel, skittering past Luca's feet and down the mountainside. Cold air breathed across him.

Luca drew a quick breath of his own. He was shaking, he realized, but not from cold. The darkness inside the cave was absolute, opaque as deepwater.

Please, he thought. Let this be right.

He fumbled in his pack for candle and match, struck it with his trembling hands, and stepped over the threshold, into the dark.

***

It seemed a substance, dense as water. Stepping through it was like stepping from solid ground into the depths of the ocean.

The candle flame painted movement onto the shadows, illuminating in flares and flickers the paintings on the cave walls. They were like the ones in Valeris Palace, in the hidden corridors, but time had not worn them down. They shone vivid- square-sailed ships with eyes painted on their bows, laden with people. Witches flew above, their dark wings trailing lightning, and in their hands they held objects rendered in glimmering silver: cups, and blades, and instruments for which he had no name, all streaming forth blue light.

Whaleglass, Luca thought. Whaleglass artifacts. He'd never seen so many, not all at once. Where had they gone?

He reached the end of the passage gallery, the final ship. It bore Valeria in full armor. He recognized her high-bridged profile so like his own. Her eyes were not gray beneath the brow of her helmet, but golden. Witch eyes.

He glanced at the others, and found matching expressions of confusion.

They passed beneath a heavy stone lintel, into the next chamber. This one was hung with stalactites, great fangs of stone reaching down from the unseen ceiling. Their footsteps echoed away, away, into the dark; Luca could see his breath in the air. He lifted the candle, and the edge of its light touched a shape, familiar, wholly out of place.

"Is that-" Cereza whispered.

"A ship," Luca said. It lay on its side in the cavern, caught between stalagmites like a scrap of gristle in a sea-ork's mouth. Time had not much affected it, like the paintings; its square sail, made of ruddy canvas, was furled, its mast hacked-out but otherwise hale.

"How by the Saints did that get here?" Alois said.

Maybe the cave entryway was bigger, signed Sirin.

"Maybe they took it apart and re-built it in here," supplied Cereza.

"That sounds like a lot of unnecessary work," Niive grumbled.

"Everyone shut up," Luca said. He ran his hand down its timbers, the gentle swell of its hull, the painted eyes on its bow, staring into the darkness from centuries past. A cluster of long black feathers was tied to the bowsprit- witch-feathers. Of course. Were these her consort's, he wondered? Had he come here with her, stayed here with her?

A whisper traced his mind.

He lifted his head, scanning the dark. "Anyone else hear that?"

"I did," Cereza murmured. She faced away from him, deeper into the cave. He heard it again: a whisper, a chime, whaleglass ringing deep in the dark. "Loud and clear."

Luca went to her side and found her hand. Her palm was sweaty; he took it, and held it, tight in his own.

They found steps beyond, hacked into the cave passageway. The walls were unworked, arched like palace corridors, their candle illuminating stride-lengths of step, and cave, and darkness. The descent seemed to pass over hours, and over seconds, an eternity of steps and shadow, of singing nerves and sweaty hands, Cereza's grip an anchor point.

At last, the final step was gone, and Luca heard the echoes pool before him, and expand, and shiver, breaking a long-sleeping silence. A faint column of moonslight filtered down from above; a few yards overhead he glimpsed the aperture, a cleft that must have been a mere break in the rock. The moonslight illuminated the drift of dust in the air, illuminated the dais of stacked stone in the cavern's center, its surface blackened and scorched.

A grave-pyre.

Objects were lain on its surface: a suit of armor, spellforged steel wrought in the shapes of feathers, ornate and ancient, leather straps dried brittle as old sinew. A sword lay by the left hand of the armor: not steel, but carved entirely of whaleglass, its blade rippling with prismatic light.

Valeria's sword. Not lost, but here, waiting so many centuries deep beneath the earth. If that was her sword-

"It's her tomb," Luca whispered. "This is Valeria's tomb."

He approached, slowly, his step soundless as he climbed the steps of the dais. So did Cereza; she touched the sword, the long clean length of it, whaleglass humming faintly at her touch. Luca went to the armor, to the helmet laid in place of a head, wrought with long backswept wings at the temples. He traced the line of a cheek guard, traced the feathered pauldron, the hawk with wings spread that made up the breastplate.

His vision blurred, his throat tight. He rested his hand over the hawk, over the place where Valeria's heart would be were she still alive. He imagined a pulse beneath his palm, living, beating. He almost felt it.

He did feel it.

"Cee," he said. "I...I think-"

He lifted away the breastplate. Beneath, on the flame-scarred rock, lay a chunk of whaleglass bound in silver. He'd seen another like it, in another grave, in the hand of a dead Aiatar general. That one had held- Triune, that one had held a ghost.

"Oh," Cereza breathed.

Luca reached for the ghost-stone. All felt suspended- flight or a fall, he was not sure. He paused, fingertips inches from the stone, then took it, holding it in his palm, feeling its living pulse like a second heartbeat.

Light flickered in its depths.

Silver, brightening. Luca pulled away, stumbling down the dais, as it spun and weaved together into substance, into form. Sirin caught him, steadying him. He wanted to reach for her, but all he could do was stare.

She stood before them, alongside the pyre where she'd burned. She was made of silver light, but in watching her, Luca began to see glints of color- the brown of her hair and skin, the gold of her eyes. He thought of her statue in the grand Palace agora and knew they'd got it all wrong. Valeria was tall, but that was where the resemblance ended. Her shoulders were broad beneath her armor, her bare arms latticed with scars. The lines of her face were strong under hair cropped close to her scalp. A scar carved down through one eyebrow, almost bisecting her lower lip.

Her eyes settled on Luca and Cereza, and Luca felt the force of her gaze like touch.

"Valeria," he said, and fell to his knees.

"Get up, boy."

Luca lifted his head, blinking. "Yes, like that," Valeria went on. She spoke Old Lapidaean, some centuries out of date but comprehensible, her voice a husky drawl. A fishwife's voice, not a queen's. "On your feet. Now. I can't bear to see the top of your head down there."

Luca stood slowly, a little awkward. He and Valeria were the same height, and as he stared at her she smiled a little, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "I don't understand. You're her? How can you be her?"

"How indeed?" She lifted her arms. "I am Queen Valeria. I am the witch-queen, the conqueror, the commander of magic, architect of peace and destroyer of my enemies. It was I who turned the armies of the Estaran Empire to ashes and seared their armadas with my lightning. It was I who hacked off Laurais' head as he knelt before me in the dust, and I who took his throne, my hands still dripping with his blood. It was I who built Valeris on the bones of the city that came before,  still smoldering from the power of my onslaught."

She lowered her arms, and laughed, a rough, inelegant bray. "It was I who gasped my last here in this stupid bloody cave."

"Why?" Cereza said. Valeria's eyes flicked to her. "Why abandon Valeris, if it took so much pain and effort to win it? Why would you do that?"

Valeria's grin faded.

"Damn Valeris," she muttered. "Damn glory. Damn it all. It...it slipped through my fingers. It wasn't what I set out to create. None of it. You know what all this was? What this was?" She tapped the hilt of her sword.

"Whaleglass?" Luca said.

"Nothing more powerful, nor more volatile. Nothing deadlier, you know, than power. Is that why you came here? For my secrets, my wisdom? You can turn around and leave. I have nothing for you. How did you find me, anyway?"

"That was me," Cereza said. "I...I felt you, breathed your dreams in Valeris, and followed them here. And before, too. There was a ruin. An Aiatar ruin, full of skeletons, full of ghosts. One of them said your name. He said you killed all the Aiatar there."

"I didn't kill all the Aiatar in that ruin, girl," Valeria said, and her voice was at once weary. "I killed all the Aiatar."

She let out her breath and slumped backward onto the edge of the pyre, her shoulders curled in.

"Get out of here, children," she muttered. "Run and forget, like I did."

Annoyance flared as Luca pushed forward, standing over Valeria. "You might have holed yourself up in this dreary little cave, but we haven't got that luxury. The Leviathan is dead. I killed it. And now, its battling halves are set to tear Lapide apart if you don't buck up and tell us what we came here to know. At great personal risk, might I add. Don't you bloody tell me we did so for nothing."

She watched him as he spoke, then turned, staring off into the dust. Luca coaxed Puppy forward, and the little creature drew in, eyes wide and bright. Valeria tensed as it nosed its muzzle into her palm, as it half-closed its eyes in pleasure, as it began to softly purl, a gentle pulse of light illuminating the matter of Valeria's ghost.

Luca heard her faint exhale. She began to stroke Puppy's head, its back; she touched its ears in wonder, traced the edges of its eyes.

It yipped, and Valeria smiled again.

"You remind me of me," she murmured. "Before. A long time before. Has it really been so long?"

She lifted her eyes.

"I killed the Aiatar," she said. "Because we were their slaves. And we would still be their slaves, if I had not killed them all. Oh, they kept us, they loved us. They even buried us in their tombs with them, so we might amuse them in death. We were their pets, their possessions. Never their equals. And when they had use for us, they killed us, and bled us dry to fuel their power."

"They?" Cereza whispered. Behind her Niive stood rigid, eyes wide in her pale face.

"The queens. There were three. High Queen Mazarin gathered whaleglass to forge into weapons for the Empire, in Rashavir. Her stronghold."

"The Sunken Ruins," Luca said. His blood felt glittering, an ocean of stars inside him.

"Sunken because I sank them," Valeria said. She lifted her hands, sudden, savage, and slashed hooked fingers through the air like falling bolts of lightning. "I roused my fellow slaves to revolution. I lit the flames of war in them, hot enough to break chains, stoke bloodlust from fear. And we were afraid. They were magic, the Aiatar, they were power, and they knew it. Nothing more dangerous than assurance of victory.

"But we were weak to them, cowed by terror and reverence, and they never expected us to take their magic. To use it. To wield it like a sword and cut them down at their roots. I tore the stones of Rashavir from their foundations; I cast them into the sea. And once I did, armed with whaleglass weapons tempered in my people's blood, I took those people, and I sailed to war. Every Aiatar stronghold. Every Aiatar colony. Every beacon, holding their cities' power, I sundered. Every Sentinel, stilled. And every Aiatar who raised arms against us, I slaughtered."

She lowered her hands. "There were Aiatar who stayed loyal to their queens. Others who tried to run with all the power they could carry, hoping they might run far enough from us to escape our anger. All it did was help our cause, split the Empire, crumble it faster. They might have written the rules of their magic, but they were slave to it, too, and when they found it turned against them, they crumbled like the rest."

"Then your armies-" Luca began.

"Made up of the slaves I gathered, throughout the years of destroying the final dregs of the Empire. It took centuries, boy, and no mistake." She gestured to her eyes. "My Aiatar blood granted me a life long enough to see them go by. I wanted a home for them, a place that was our own, not...not ruins, not the cities they'd been slaves in. We wandered. Decades we wandered, over cruel seas and kind, following the path of moonslight across the waves, living on our hope. At last we found these shores. This could be right, I thought. This place could be home."

"Then it was you," Cereza said quietly. "You're the source of the witch-blood in our family."

"Our family?" Valeria snorted. "You're not my family, girl."

Luca couldn't breathe. Cereza blinked, then went on. "But your witch-consort, he-"

"She," Valeria said. "She." Her voice dropped, and her body grew still, the look in her eyes faraway. "Tuija."

"Then-"

"You think you're my blood? The culmination of some sacred birthright?" Valeria stood, towering head and shoulders over Cereza. "Vala. That's what the Aiatar called me. Means mongrel. Not human, not Aiatar, and worse than both. I liked it, the thought of mongrel teeth locked in Queen Mazarin's throat. I kept it so I would never forget what made me. And my followers thought it a crown to set on their heads, a badge of honor, a symbol of superiority."

A muscle feathered in her jaw. "I...I never wanted to be like Mazarin. I never wanted to become like her. We chose a new leader amongst ourselves- not a leader by birthright, but by worth. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had too much faith in them. Maybe I had too much faith in myself."

"What happened?" asked Luca.

"Oh, power," Valeria muttered. "Fighting. Wars between those who wanted to rule. The victor stole my name. Your ancestor, I suppose, some towheaded gull-brain. I left in disgust. Tuija...she begged me to stay, to fight again, but I was tired. I was so tired. It was all the same again. The killing, the dying, the innocent lives caught between. All just the same."

"No," Luca said. "It's not."

He knelt before her gently, taking Valeria's cold hand.

"It's not," he said again. "There are still fools, and madmen, and I count myself among them. But there is still hope. You felt it, once. Hope, and anger, to stand, to fight, to look in the face of what chained you and snarl no. You stood. You fought. And you freed us."

He turned her face to his. "You said it yourself. Without you, we would all of us be slaves. But because of you there is life, and freedom, and people who want those things as hard as you once did. There's a better world possible, and it was all because of you."

Hope wasn't an end. He saw that now. It was years of night spent searching for the stars. It was going on even when there was no right reason. To fight for peace, for all, justice for the world, and balance, always balance.

"I might not have your blood," Luca said, "but I have your fury, and your hope. You put it there. In me. In all of us."

She searched his eyes. Luca felt tears streak his face, but he couldn't look away.

"Maybe," Valeria murmured. "Maybe you're right."

"We need to fix what I broke. Rejoin the two halves of the Great Leviathan. Please, if there's anything you know-"

"I don't know how to heal the whale," Valeria said, and Luca's next inhale felt crushed to nothing. "But I know what might."

"Tell me."

"Rashavir," Valeria said. She drew away; Luca felt the cold brush of her fingertips against the side of his face, and then they were gone again. She stood, her back straight, her eyes brilliant in the gloom of her grave. "The two halves will be stronger there, strong enough perhaps to bind together again. All magic is stronger there, at the source."

"The source," Luca echoed. Rashavir's crescent on the map. A great form, a vast whale, curled on its side. Islands rising from the waves. Dead gods, stone gods.

Realization struck him, like the flare of sunrise off the sea.

"The source," he said again. "It's a dead Leviathan, isn't it?"

"Clever lad. That's why Mazarin built her city there. It's the Leviathan's grave. Its first grave. Where it died to make the world."

To die, to return. To die once more. Luca felt that billow of stars through him again, wild and rushing. Its first grave. His mind felt fragile; all of him felt fragile. He didn't know if he could get up again. But Cereza was there, and Sirin, and Alois, and even Niive, her hands shaking, her eyes filled with tears, too.

He tried to speak, and couldn't.

"We'll go," Cereza said for him. "We'll make this right."

Valeria's outline flickered, tongues of silvery fire blurring her edges. The ghost-stone pulsed. Cracks feathered over its surface.

"Don't," Luca managed. His voice sounded raw. "Stay, please stay-"

"Maybe this is why I waited. Why I came here, so far from the battlefield my sword might be mistaken for an oar, this place that knows nothing of the past," Valeria said. "Yes. I think it is. As if I knew, somehow. As if in a dream."

"You didn't know," Cereza said. "You didn't dream."

"I know." Valeria touched Puppy between the eyes, a brush of her thumb to its iridescent fur. "Maybe you'll get it right."

She faded, and as her light became nothing the ghost-stone crumbled, its facets dark once more.

In the moonslight, on the far side of the tomb, stood Isabella. Luca knew, by her wide eyes, she'd seen everything.

***

He found her sitting on a rock above, staring down the mountainside, all the way to the sea. Dawn was on its way, the horizon pale. The light hadn't reached them yet, and Isabella's face was lit only by the fading stars. Her hair was still damp from the river, straggling around her face in ropes, and a few cuts spackled her face.

"I'm glad you didn't drown," Luca said. "Imagine that, killed by a river. You'd never live it down."

"Valere sovereigns have died in far more ignominious ways," Isabella murmured. "Who's that one you like? Queen...Miranze?"

"The Six-Day Queen. Poor little thing. Fourteen years old when she took the crown, and fourteen years old when she drowned in her bath, too timid to tell her servants they'd filled it too deep, and out of fear she'd never learned to swim."

"I fear I never learned to swim," Isabella said. "I thought I did. You have to be ready for it, Mother told me. You have to be ready for anything. But I wasn't."

Luca sat next to her on the rock. Puppy slipped between them, curling underfoot, its body pressed to Isabella's calf. Its eyes reflected the coming day.

"All this time I believed in something," Isabella said. Her hands curled in, so tight her skin stretched white over her knuckles. "I believed it so hard. Who we were. What we were. The shining legacy that I could rekindle again, if only I was strong enough, if only I was good enough. It's nothing. It never was. All of us, all the Valeres, we're nothing but frauds and tricksters, tinsel kings and mummers' hawks..."

"Damn the kings and damn their hawks. Valeria was real. She never wanted there to be a crown, a gods-appointed sovereign. She never wanted a legacy, nor a lineage. She only wanted her people to be free."

"And look at what she became. Bitter and defeated."

"Her teachings were real. What she did was real." Luca reached for her hands and prised them open again. The palm of her flesh hand was scraped and bloodied from where she must have caught onto rocks in the river and clambered her way out. Puppy nosed its way up and began gently licking her palm. "It doesn't matter where we came from. All the good and bad we did is the same nevertheless. The world she described...it's possible."

Isabella lowered her head. Her eyes were red and shining.

"You're so forgiving," she said quietly. "I always pretended you were a fool for it. For your journeys up into these mountains, for your birds and your books and the dust in your hair. For not seeking glory. But I was the coward. I was the one afraid of the flames, and thought that by taunting them I could somehow...somehow drown my nightmares. Of our father, of blue fire, of all our dead at the bottom of the sea."

A tear broke from her lashes and slid down her face, cutting a clean track through the grime. "I wish I could take back all my years of being so cruel to you. All my years of denying there was any other way."

"And I wish I could take back all my years of fighting you."

"I'm sorry I doubted you."

"And I'm sorry for being-"

"-Gull-brained? Reckless? Entirely without propriety?"

Luca made a face. "Isabella, you lance my soul like a boil. No." He leaned his shoulder to hers. "No. I wish I had been there when it mattered. For Lapide, yes. But for you, too."

"If you hadn't gone, Cereza would be dead right now. You saved her, Luca. You believed she could be saved. I'm not like that."

"You are. You're here now."

"We both are."

"At last we find something to agree on."

"I wish it had been sooner."

"I missed you, Bell."

She smiled. "I missed you, too, Luca."

The others had gathered some distance away, hunched shoulders and shivering hands, Niive curling her wings around Cereza and Alois for warmth while Sirin stood, as always, alone. Cereza had taken Valeria's whaleglass sword with her from the tomb, and now held it across her knees, running her hands over its surface, her head bent to Niive's and Alois's, the three of them engaged in what looked like fierce conversation.

Luca and Isabella watched them for a while, the sunrise gathering in strength, turning the sky gold and rose and scarlet, streaked with the looming gray clouds of the coming storm.

"I can't believe Cereza is alive," Isabella said.

"Neither can I."

"She died and it brought her back?"

Luca nodded. "It did."

"I wish I had seen it. The Great Leviathan. Just once." Isabella brought her whaleglass hand to her face, its facets glimmering in the light. Slowly she scrubbed away her tears, then held out her hand, as if watching the play of color through the warped depths of the crystal.

"It doesn't hurt anymore," she said. "Before, it ached, all the time. After what your little friend did on the riverbank...the pain is gone."

She lifted her other palm, and the prisms flickered over her skin, now unmarked, scrapes healed over.

Isabella lowered her hands to Puppy's head, paused, then began to stroke it, long, slow strokes down from its ears to the base of its spine. She traced swirls across its fur, around its ears, under its chin. Puppy's eyes closed to contented slits.

"It really is a god," Isabella murmured.

"Maybe. But I do know we can make this right. Together."

"Together," Isabella echoed, her fingers still tracing patterns in Puppy's black fur.

She stiffened. Footsteps crunched on loose stones. Isabella leaped to her feet with a cry. She reached for a sword, but her hands closed on empty air. A dark figure stepped from the mist, dressed in a ragged coat of Estaran crimson. Luca blinked as he took in dark, unkempt hair, eyes bruised, but familiar, sharp as they fixed not on him, but Isabella.

"Acier?" Luca gasped.

"Acier!" Alois snarled, and lunged. Isabella flung out her arm, stopping him. He stood, fists clenched, while Enzo stared back, his face still and calm. Shapes glimmered in the fog- coils and glints of silver light, forming shadows, forming-

Ghosts.

Faint cries rippled through the air, voices warped and fractured, sobs and screams and whispers. Luca's throat tightened as the air turned bitter between his teeth. Magic filled the mountainside, radiating from Enzo as he stood, his hands at his sides, his eyes still fastened on Isabella. Sirin's eyes darted from Luca, to Enzo, to Luca again, but she made no move, even as her shadow pooled and became dense underfoot.

"Don't," Enzo said. "Please. I'm not here to fight."

"I'll kill him," Alois roared. "I'll kill him for what he did-"

"Stop," Isabella said. "I said, stop."

"Is your dreadnought here?" Luca said, glancing down toward the bay. "Crewed by ghosts, I understand?"

"Yes." Enzo's voice was hoarse with exhaustion.

"Now that's something I'd like to see, Acier. Or is it Belmont? No matter. I've always wanted a cousin. Shame you betrayed my country and murdered my mother."

Enzo's eyes glinted. "Shame your mother murdered mine."

He lifted his hands. The silver light died down, spectral whispers fading. Luca let out his breath.

"But I meant what I said," Enzo went on. "I'm not here to fight. I'm not here for forgiveness, either."

"Then why by all the Saints are you here?" Alois said.

"I don't regret what it is I did to Sofia Valere, nor to Daval Belmont. They were a plague on both our nations. But I know what I did to you, and I regret that. I know..."

He paused, his eyes narrowed and downcast.

"I know there are some things worth the keeping," he said at last. "I came to help you now, in any way I can. Did you find what you were looking for?"

"Yes." Cereza came forward with Valeria's sword. A ray of dawnlight struck it, and flared into a dazzling sunburst, all the colors of the world dashed to pieces across the stones. It splintered the mist, splintered the night. Even Sirin's shadows paled as it touched them.

Cereza lifted it. It took her both hands, the blade an arm's length of glittering crystal, the edges so sharp Luca sensed the air hum around them. She brought the blade up, its point hovering, delicately, inches from Enzo's face.

"I should kill you for what you did to us," she said. "To me."

"And you would be right to do so."

She lifted her chin, her face pale, her jaw clenched. "I should order you to your knees. I should strike your head from your shoulders."

"Then order my death," Enzo said. "I only ask the mercy of a quicker one than I sentenced you."

Her knuckles blanched as her grip on the sword tightened, as she stared up its length at Enzo, as he stared back. The swordpoint trembled; Luca heard Cereza's breath catch between her teeth, heard the hiss of her exhale as she dropped her arms.

The blade struck the stone at her feet.

"We found Valeria," she said. "We found what we have to do to resurrect the Leviathan. You think you can help us?"

Enzo's mouth curved into a sharp smile. "I know I can, Princess."

She stared at him, her eyes hard, then nodded. "We need to set sail and head north to Rashavir."

"We're going to have something of a problem with that." Luca faced the horizon. The light began to fade, Valeria's sword dimming once more. The sun became a pale circle through a wall of advancing stormclouds. Lightning struck the waves, flaring an unearthly aura around the waiting Leviathan as it swam back and forth. Vast swells rose and fell, a second mountain range in the middle of the sea.

"We're not leaving while it's there," Luca went on.

"Sirin?" Cereza glanced at her. "Can you...?"

Sirin blinked, her mouth tightening. I don't-

"No," Isabella said quietly.

Luca turned to her. She was staring at Enzo, and he at her.

"No," Isabella said again. "I know what we have to do."

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 26- Luca

***

Triune, Luca thought. I really am going to die.

The crowd was a buzz at the fringes of his senses, not quite reaching him. Luca tasted sweat, pricked free by the hot pour of floodlamps arcing down from above. They struck the sand below white and blinding.

"Give them a good show," Bateleur said, behind him.

"Wouldn't want to go out any other way," Luca muttered.

Atana, her hands again folded, sat at her father's right. Irene sprawled at Bateleur's left side, the box containing the Belmont cup balanced on one thigh. Her whaleglass eye glittered as she looked Luca up and down, then grinned, plucking another pale green berry from its bunch and flicking it into her mouth. Cereza and Sirin stood, chained, amongst the Isozi. He couldn't bear to look at them; he turned and stared down into the pit again. The sand was fresh, not yet bloodied. He was to be the first fight of the evening, to get the night's beast hungry.

The crowd's energy rose like steam. He'd heard mutterings as he was dragged here- they'd brought in something special for him, a monster infamous and unparalleled. He was almost flattered they'd gone to the trouble.

"Lords and ladies and loyal gentlefolk alike," Bateleur called, voice amplified by the wired grille by his dais, "I give you Prince Luca Valere! Long may he reign!"

The crowd roared as Bateleur jerked Luca's chains. He stumbled to the edge of the platform, overlooking the pit and the row upon row of mezzanines. Someone had set a ladder against the wall; the drop wavered before him, white pulsing at the edges of his vision. His muscles seemed winched tight, the crowd's roar coalescing into pulses: a word, chanted, again and again. He couldn't make it out.

"You want to go down hard, or easy?" Bateleur said.

"...What?"

"Hard it is." Bateleur shoved him; Luca twisted, reaching for a handhold, but there was nothing. He tipped over the edge, weightless, slamming with bone-jarring force into the sand. It billowed around him as he maneuvered onto his hands and knees, squinting up at Bateleur overhead. The ladder was already withdrawn, scraping and clattering over the stones. Someone threw his chains down after him, and they spooled with soft hisses to his sides.

"Wait," Luca called. "Wait!" He scrambled to his feet; he could hear the word now, the chant, beat hammered with knife hilts and fists and nailed boots, with voices all shouting a name: Worm! Worm! Worm!

"Bateleur!" Luca cried. "Don't I get a weapon?"

"Of course you do." It spun down, impaling itself in inches of sand. Luca's heart clenched. A wooden sword. He'd given him a bloody wooden sword.

Gears ground: Luca spun, eyes wide, toward the pair of massive iron-and-timber doors at the far end of the pit, flanked by a pair of crumbling statues. The doors opened, inches at a time. Something moved inside, slamming against the doors, something massive and pale and roiling, beating at the timber as if it couldn't wait to smash them open and surge through for its meat.

"Damn you, Bateleur!" he shouted, voice raw.

"I'm sure you do," Bateleur called down. "But not for long."

Worm. Worm. Worm. Luca backed away; he hit the wall, stone hot against his shoulderblades, and clenched on with both hands. Sand vibrated under his feet: the weight of something huge. A deep, ululating snarl echoed between the doors. Force hit them again, and hinges squealed, chains ratcheting to pull them wider. Luca could not move- like a hare under the full moons, he could not make himself run. And where would he run to?

Best to go fast, painless-

Paralyzed, blue smoke searing his throat, his soldier pleading in his arms as he pressed his hands to her gut wound, trying and failing to staunch the bloodflow. Gore covered the decks, the rigging already catching fire. Cannons fired, concussive blasts, closer, closer, Estara was coming closer, and all of them were going to die-

Worm. Worm. Worm. The gears caught, locking, doors wide, and the monster poured through, propelling itself on stocky, clawed legs. Rivers of muscle and scar-split armor plates surged forth, an improbably sinuous movement. Lizard-like, low-slung, it had to be forty feet from the tip of its snout to the end of its armored tail. Long, saurian jaws lined in double rows of teeth snapped, rending at the air. Twin ridges of scale wound down its back, becoming thick, knobbed spikes jutting from either side of its tail; a blow from that alone would shear Luca in half. It was completely pallid, claws like hooks of bone, scale and armor gleaming ivory under the floodlamps.

It lifted its massive head and bellowed, drowning out the cheers of the crowd. The sound shattered Luca's paralysis. Thought flooded back, and he gave a choked, desperate laugh.

"A sarkyvor," he breathed. An albino sarkyvor. He'd never seen the beasts, only their teeth like daggers, only their bones, cleaned and wired and mounted in the Academy halls. This one was a monster, bigger than any he'd read of before, and old. It must have taken nearly a century to grow so huge. It dragged itself over the sand, weaving back and forth on its short legs. Milky eyes glittered beneath its brow-ridges: one on its right side, two on its left, swelling from the same socket like tumorous growths.

Worm. Worm. Worm. The crowd's chant crested, and the sarkyvor bellowed again. Luca flinched. His chains rattled and the monster whipped toward him, jaws wide and dripping with dark slaver.

"Make your bets," roared Bateleur from somewhere above. "Make them quick."

Terror flooded back, eclipsing wonder. This thing wasn't some Academy specimen. This monster was hungry, and if it caught him it would eat him alive.

The sarkyvor lunged. Luca threw himself off the wall as the beast lunged, a missile of flesh and tons of muscle. It slammed hard into the stone. Rock crumbled, fragments bouncing off its armor as it swept back round, fast, too fast, and hit sand again. Luca twisted, bringing up his hands- stupid, stupid, Valere-

Force parted the air. It slammed into Luca's stomach, a battering ram of blunt scales; pain cracked through him, breath driven from him in a rush. The tail. He'd forgotten about the thing's tail. He was flung, the world a blur of sand and pale monster and searing light. He hit the sand and tumbled to his hands and knees.

His vision pitched and rolled. He registered the monster turning, the roar of the crowd, Bateleur's amplified voice echoing off the temple heights.

Somewhere-

"Luca!"

His name.

"Luca, get up!"

Cereza. Or was he imagining her? His head spun. His arms didn't want to lift him. They shook, threatening to put him back on the sand. An offering for the beast. Captain Irene was wrong. This place was still a temple, a house of sacrifice. The gods here still drank lives, the Leviathan getting its share of blood.

The Leviathan.

His heart gave a single hard pulse. The Great Leviathan. It was out there. It was hope, and an end to this curse the world was under. He knew it, he knew it stronger than he knew he could stand again.

It was more than that. Finding the Leviathan meant Cereza's life, and to save that life he'd see his harpoon bleed the god out before the end.

He couldn't die. Not until Sirin was set free. Not until Cereza's curse was broken. Not until he saw the whale with his waking eyes and knew his belief, knew his doubt, knew his fear had not been for nothing.

Not until he saw this done.

Sand shook under his palms. Luca forced his head up. The sarkyvor's jaws parted, meters from his face. He felt the hot blast of its breath, its roar of anticipation before it tore him in two. He shoved the sand away, ducking his head as he threw himself into an ungainly roll. The sarkyvor thundered past, jaws clashing where he'd crouched. He heard its snort of surprise when its jaws met nothing, no crunch, no gush of blood.

Luca didn't look back. He was already running, dragging his chains behind him. The crowd's howl turned dark- jeers, taunts, curses flung at him to stumble, to give in, to make this fast. Luca reached the cratered sand under Bateleur's platform. He cast a smirk upward and plucked the wooden sword from the sand.

The sarkyvor rounded on him, beating its tail hard against the ground, throwing up great clouds of sand. Luca jerked to a halt, sword quivering in his hands, staring at the monster. Its head swung from side to side, jaws snapping. Its eyes rolled.

Its eyes. His shallow breaths hissed through clenched teeth.

Is it-

Is it-

He had to be right. He had to be, or he was dead.

The sarkyvor paced forward, one step, two, underbelly hissing over the sand. Luca held his breath. Its jaws parted again, ropes of slaver stretching between its teeth. He could see past its massive glistening tongue, down its black-mottled throat. The reek of rotting meat rolled over him.

Sweat traced a line of cold down Luca's face.

Its nostrils gaped. It was smelling him. Because he was right- it couldn't see him. It had to smell him, or listen for him.

The monster was blind.

"He's right there, Worm!" someone yelled from the crowd. "He's right bloody there!"

The sound seemed to lash the sarkyvor into action. A roar ripped from its throat, and it flung itself toward Luca. His pulse jolted, and he lunged toward the sarkyvor's widening jaws. Mere feet from its teeth, he thrust his wooden sword forward, not like Isabella would do to pin the monster down, but angled up, tip aimed for the roof of the sarkyvor's mouth. Its jaws snapped shut as he spun to the side, whipping his hand out between two of the monster's teeth.

The sarkyvor shrieked as he whirled into a crouch, facing the beast. Its tail lifted, its jaws trapped half-open, the wooden sword angled between them.

"Not fair!" cried a voice- Matteo's- from on high.

"Whip me for it later!" Luca yelled.

He gathered his chains in both hands, swinging them into loops, swinging a loop under the sarkyvor's thick neck and around, forming a double-row collar of chains. He stumbled away as the sarkyvor reared, massive body flashing white through the spotlamps, swinging its head back and forth. It clawed at the air, legs too short to dislodge the sword. It bowed inside its mouth, seconds from snapping.

Haste, Valere. He skidded past one of the statues guarding the walls of the pit, beasts of uncertain aspect, all snarling fangs and claws. He tossed a second loop of chain into the statue's mouth; it caught a canine tooth and pulled tight. Impact rattled his molars, and he spared a glance back as the sarkyvor crashed to the ground. Muscle wrenched in its jaws, and the wooden sword snapped in two. The pieces spun away.

The sarkyvor glided toward him, rage and pain glistening in its blind eyes. Ache twisted in Luca's heart.

He wrenched the chain, hard. It ripped at his hands; the pain blurred his vision, but the chains responded, grating through the statue's teeth and tightening around the sarkyvor's neck. Chain pressed into the slick scales of its throat. Its eyes bulged, another scream whistling through its teeth. It thrashed, claws tearing at the sand as it strained for him, but the chain held it back.

Luca yanked again. Links rattled, chains pulling tighter. The scream tightened to a wheeze. The sarkyvor's tail slammed back and forth, raining chips of stone from the ceiling. Blood glistened under the chain links. Luca's muscles burned, his hands burned; he cried out in strain and agony, his whole weight thrown back against the chain as he pulled it hand over hand, link by link, tighter and tighter.

The sarkyvor reared again, huge and white and magnificent, then crashed to the sand, limp, jaws skewed wide. Clouds billowed, lit from within by the floodlamps. Blood ebbed between the beast's teeth. Its body rippled, muscles spasming, dying piece by piece. Life left its eyes last, dulling as they rolled up in their sockets.

Luca let go of the chain.

The crowd was silent. He felt eyes on him and paid them no mind. He limped to the dead sarkyvor and smoothed his hand over its head, touching its slick teeth, the joint of its powerful jaws.

"Sorry," he whispered.

Sand settled around them, winking like stars. He wanted to drop to his knees, to curl up next to the monster, to close his eyes and never open them again, but he didn't. He couldn't. He tugged the chains loose and limped toward Bateleur, who stood watching him at the edge of his platform.

Luca stopped at the base of the wall and tipped his head back.

"Shoot him," Irene said.

The hall erupted with the sound of cocking pistols, rifles, muskets and blunderbusses and crossbows, all pointed down at him.

Bateleur lifted his hand. "He won," he said. "Fair and square."

The ladder was lowered, and Luca clambered up. Isozi helped him onto the platform. He glanced at Bateleur, then limped past him. He paused before Irene, who stared back, her mismatched eyes narrowed.

"Leverage," Luca said, with a shrug.

He tugged the box containing the Belmont cup from her and turned to the chair at Bateleur's right hand. Atana had not moved, her hands still folded on her knees. Her blue gaze was steady as Luca opened the box and plucked forth the Cup. Its prismatic glimmer made his mangled hands look twice as bad. A jug of water waited alongside the piles of fruit. He dipped the cup in and offered it to Atana.

"Drink it," he said. "It'll help."

"Atana," Bateleur said sharply.

"It's all right, Pa," Atana said. "He's not lying."

She took the Cup and drank. Luca's pulse pounded. Light flushed through her skin, through her hair, coiling up its curls. As it passed through her, it changed her. The gray cast to her skin leached away, replaced with a healthy glow. Her posture straightened, her fingers clenching tight on the Cup. She gasped, eyes snapping wide, light fading from within her.

"Oh," she whispered. She looked up. "Pa."

"I'll take my ship now," Luca said.

He didn't say anything else. His legs gave out from under him, and he collapsed. The ground came up to meet him.

***

The water helped his hands, leaching away both pain and his lingering quiver of fear. No ordinary water, this; it was warm, and glowed pale green, leaving a phosphorescent glimmer on the surface of his skin. Steam furled from its surface, faintly sulfurous. It gushed from some source deep below Bateleur's temple to fill these baths, long rectangular pools deep enough for Luca to submerge in.

He'd scrubbed for what seemed like hours; dirt and sweat sloughed off him like some disgusting second skin, leaving a scum atop the water. Thanks to some hidden current, the pool was now clean again. He stared down at his hands, covered in a layer of chewed staunchmoss. It had begun to flake off, leaving abraded gashes that were pinkish instead of raw, the moss and the Belmont cup working their tandem magics.

He lowered his hands and tipped his head against the side of the pool. The baths were all lapping echoes and crumbling walls, red vines intruding from without, so he felt he was half in some wilderness, accompanied by nothing but the trickle of water and the slow unfurling of steam. Music, raucous and tinkling, threaded from somewhere above.

Day had passed in a haze of pain and unconsciousness- he'd slept through much of it- and when he woke again, evening had come to An Gholam, the sky a bruised splendor of sunset and clouds stained with volcanic smoke, sun melting across the surface of the sea. Cereza and Atana read together, and they'd smiled at him as he sat up, bleary, from his mound of pillows.

"How are you feeling?" Cereza had asked.

He'd blinked at her. "Fine," he'd rasped.

"Liar," Atana sang.

It was true. He hurt, and his dreams had been full of thrashing beasts and blood, the squeal of chains, blue fire. So he'd retreated here. The water was a balm, and his eyes were heavy. He let them close.

The tink of glass on stone startled his eyes open. He sat up, water sloshing around him, as Sirin set down a bottle and a pair of ceramic cups on the edge of his bath.

She looked up at him. You weren't about to fall asleep in there, were you? Her eyes flicked over his body. You might drown.

"No," Luca said quickly. Heat crept up his neck. He was quite naked, and the water quite clear. "What are you doing here?"

She tapped the bottle.

"Oh, plying me with alcohol, I see. What is it?"

She shrugged. One finger lengthened into a shadowy talon; she impaled the cork and wrenched it loose, flicking it across the room. Pouring a generous dollop into each cup, she offered one and raised her eyebrows.

"Oh, give it," Luca said, and downed the black liquid like water. It burned going down, worse than his hands, and he made a face. "Triune."

More?

"Yes, please."

They drank again. "I might drown if I drink much more of this," he said. "Is that your aim here? Get me well and sotted and then push my head underwater?"

His voice was light, but Sirin's eyes hardened. Luca traced the rim of his cup with his thumb. "Where did you get this, anyway?"

She pointed upward. I had to refuse ten more bottles like it. Seems all it takes to make a friend is healing a pirate lord's only daughter.

Luca smiled as he poured a third cup. "I figured that was a nice touch."

More than a nice touch.

He looked at her over the rim. "You've graduated from gratitude to compliments. Whatever have I done to deserve this?"

She smiled. When it faded, Luca felt a twinge of regret. He could have watched her smiling all night.

"What?" he asked.

In the pit you seemed...frozen.

"Yes, well. Remember the bloody massive lizard."

It was not just the sarkyvor.

Luca turned his cup in his fingers. "Just another war story. Terribly dull. Not worth your time to hear it."

She didn't move.

He glanced at her. She hadn't looked away. "Are you just going to sit there and stare until I tell you more?"

She lifted her eyebrows.

Luca let out his breath.

"I requested a command mission," he said. "The prince of Lapide, leading a warship into battle...it seemed right. I wanted to help. I've never been much for the battlefield, but...I thought I could do something. Anything."

The dark liquid in the cup shivered. He remembered the black ocean, the mirror smoothness of it shifting to chop and whitecaps.

"I wasn't ready," he went on, "But I insisted. I got my ship, and my mission. We were meant to target an Estaran convoy, stop them supplying the armada. Capture the soldiers, take the supplies. A simple mission. No casualties. But the Estarans were waiting. They'd set up an ambush and I didn't realize it, despite the warning signs. I sailed my crew straight into their trap."

He met her eyes again. "They had cannons. Spellfire. I stalled. I wanted to save my soldiers, but there were so many dying, and I didn't know what to do. I went back for the wounded. There was one soldier, a girl, couldn't have been older than Cereza. She'd caught shrapnel in the stomach."

Sirin winced.

"I couldn't leave them," Luca said. "I could hear them calling out, begging the Triune to save them. The lifeboats were waiting. My crew didn't want to leave their prince."

The heat had been ferocious, sucking the air from the ship's deck. The warship had listed sideways, holes blasted in its hull, foundering against the reef. He saw the blue glow from the Estaran warship's deck, knew they were gearing up for another alchemic bolt. When it came he would burn, and his men waiting in the water would burn with him. Like his father, like so many others. Blue light, then nothing.

You left them in the end, Sirin said.

Luca nodded.

"I made it out," he muttered. "Me, and six other soldiers. All the others were dead. I never went back to the war. Sometimes I feel like that night gave me some plague, not in my body but here-"

He pressed a hand to his head. "And I can never be rid of it. I think it's gone, I think I've forgotten, but then it comes back, strong as ever. Stronger than me."

Silence fell, and pooled. He hurriedly poured another drink and tossed it down, but it didn't stop the quiver in his hands.

"I saw her," he said. "That girl. I heard her, all the time, for years after. Do you..."

He bit back his words, thought better of them, pressed on nevertheless. "Do you hear yours? See their faces?"

A flutter of her hand, as if capturing something. Always.

"You said you weren't the only one from Alkona taken," Luca said. "Did you try to find the others?"

Of course I did. For years I searched. But your island nations are vast, and swallowed them up.

"My mother's elite Falcii have means of gathering intelligence. They could help you search for them. Find them at last."

And do you think your mother's Falcii would want to help me?

She had a point. Luca shrugged, looking down into the water. "I'd help you."

He glanced up at her and found her smiling again.

"What?" he asked.

You may think you're a coward, broken or sick. You may even believe it. But no coward would do what you did last night.

"You don't have to say that."

You said as much to me. And I pay my dues, Luca Valere.

She straightened.

Get dressed. I have something to show you.

Deeper into the temple the pools became natural, irregular depressions in the rock, the walls cavernous. Phosphorescent water wept and ran in streams in rivulets, glistening off intricate carvings. The sparse lamplight illuminated reliefs: beasts with snarling teeth and too many eyes, tentacles gripping talons, alive in the darkness. Sirin slipped through the shadows with ease, Luca a few steps behind her.

At last, Sirin stopped along a stretch of bas-relief. It looked older than the rest, the shapes of the creatures blocky and glyphlike, the carvings worn with age.

A thrill passed through Luca's nerves. "These are Lapidaean," he murmured.

Sirin gave him a glance.

"Well. Not Lapidaean, exactly, but..." He traced the shapes of the figures. Islander, some; their ships had prominent prows and square sails, eyes carved onto their bows, the same as those he and Cereza had seen deep in the back halls of the Palace. Witches flew overhead, half-transformed, pulling the winds in their wake. He followed the carvings down the hall. There was no Valeria here, no conqueror-queens, just sailors with eyes turned skyward, witches with the wings of seabirds. "I've seen these before. Down in the Palace depths."

Sirin beckoned as she stepped through a narrow doorway flanked by a pair of witches, their eyes set with what had once been bronze, now corroded to greenish dust. Echoes trailed her footsteps, filling the heights of the room beyond with whispers. Water ran down the walls, collecting in a shallow pool at Luca's feet. Arched windows beamed moonslight across the floor, facing a wall of carvings. Sirin pointed. This was what she had brought him for. Luca stared, unsure for a moment of what he was seeing.

Whales, yes. A circle of them surrounding a disc of polished crystal, as if swimming across the surface of the stone. The two along each side reared back, streams of light erupting from their blowholes. Resplendent beasts, the very image of a god, like the depictions Luca had seen across the outside of the temple. But the whales above and below, north and south, seemed weaker, flukes lowered, eyes shut. Between them: a curled, fetal form.

The bitter taste of magic burned on Luca's tongue. He stepped closer. The carving towered over him, vast as the statue of the Triune in the shrine back home. It had the feeling of an altar, a holy place, but if there was power here it was long sleeping, uninterested in him.

Moonslight glinted on the disc of crystal. Ordinary, not whaleglass, but highly polished nevertheless. Luca made out his reflection in it: his broken nose, scabs and scars, the exhaustion in his eyes.

"The Leviathan," he murmured. "Dying?" He touched the moonslit stone, traced the streaming light, yearning to feel the pulse of magic in the dust. "What does it mean?"

I know as much as you do, Valere.

Which was, Luca realized, almost nothing. The Great Leviathan was a truth taught at cradleside, in songs and stories and sightings made by ancestors. Treasures made from its blood, temples built in its honor. But of the nature of the whale god, Luca was in the dark, a vast starless night lit only by what he and so many others had theorized to feign understanding. Were those pathways true, or were they lonely trails leading nowhere?

His hand moved to the dying whale. Dying. A god couldn't die, could it?

He glanced at Sirin. She looked as unsettled as he felt, as lit by wonder. He turned, and he stepped toward her. Mad, enchanted. She looked at him, too, and stilled, her eyes lightless. Luca drew breath to speak. Of what, he had no idea.

He never got the chance.

Force rippled through the pool, sloshing it over the floor as the temple rumbled and shook around them. Through the narrow window, the moonslight changed: no longer silver but blue, blue as the summer sky.

Sirin was already moving. Luca hurried to the window. The blue arc still burned in the sky, and out to sea, past the harbors:

Spellfire.

The watchtower. Someone had blown it with spellfire. The blaze raged brilliant blue atop its sea stack, illuminating the graveyard of ships. Luca glimpsed the silhouette of the vessel that had fired: twin-masted, sleek, and moving at unnatural speed.

A scarlet flag flew from its rigging. Even from here, he made out the fellfox device emblazoned across it.

Blue smoked from its deck. They had alchemic bolts. Another shot would kill- his mind scrambled to account and failed. Dozens. Hundreds, if they fired it into the city center. Wind rippled across An Gholam, metal and storm and lightning scar.

Somehow, they were here. Somehow, they'd gotten hold of a witch. None of that mattered. Sirin's breathing was fast at his side, shadow curling from her skin. He felt the flexion of her power in the air, darkness radiating from her like cold.

Azare, she signed.

She whirled and ran, and Luca followed. Estara had come. The Royal Witchhunter had found them.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 17- Alois

***

Bellana save me, Alois thought, quivering like a child as he walked between the guards. I'm going to die.

They'd come for him while he was trying to sleep. The sound of the key in the lock had roused him, and he'd scrambled to his feet as the cell door swung open to a half-dozen royal Falcii. He'd gone with them. He'd been waiting. He was ready for this. He thought he'd been ready to die for a long time. Escorted out of the cell blocks, he'd expected to turn toward the Palace agora, for a gibbet and a noose and the beating Lapidaean sun, for blue flags snapping against a blue sky to be his last sight. Instead, they'd turned deeper into the Palace.

"Where are you taking me?" he'd asked as they led him upward, his voice a dry whisper. The walls here were high and lofty and made of stone pale as milk, conducting echoes through the maze of corridors and broad stairways. He glimpsed hidden courtyards tiled with scenes of pagan legend, glimpsed statues on balconies through elegant arched doorways, wings of stone hawks cut sharp against the sky.

It was like a street magician's globe filled with fireflies, light trapped within white walls. Alois itched for the close darkness of Pavaloir Tower, the shadows he could hide in when his father entered one of his rages. Too many times he'd heard the king's voice crack like a thunderbolt, echoing down from the throne room, with its blade of a throne and the stare of Bellana, always. There, he had at least an illusion of escape. Here he was exposed, vulnerable as a fledgling tipped from its nest.

The guards gave him no answer, not so much as a glance from under the lowered visors of their helmets. Alois settled his gaze on the blue and white marble of the floor, his mouth dry, his pulse distant, like it belonged to someone else.

"Here, Highness," one of the Falcii commanded him, Lapidaean accent heavy on the word. "Through the doors."

Alois was ushered through a pair of cedar doors and into the cool darkness of a room beyond. The drapes had been drawn. Dimmed sconces provided the only illumination. No white stone or sunlight here; this was a soldier's office, spare and restrained. Panels of ammonite stone made up the walls. A massive desk, each corner supported by a winged female figure, dominated the room. Swords gleamed from racks mounted on the walls. Alois recognized an antique Estaran saber, its curved blade enameled with entwined serpents, a collection of Buyani ritual knives in bronze and human bone, even a short dagger made from star iron, a rare and sacred metal that plummeted from the sky at the hearts of falling stars.

Each glinted with evident care, edges kept honed and deadly. None looked as sharp as the eyes of Isabella Valere as she sat behind the desk, watching Alois enter. Behind her stood Enzo Acier, captain of the royal Falcii, tall and silent, one hand on the back of Isabella's chair.

"Leave us," Isabella said, raising a finger from the desk's surface. At her fingertips lay a whaleglass knife. It looked ancient, silver tarnished, jet dulled by time, but the blade was unmarred, rippling with light and translucent as crystal.

The guards bowed, retreating. The doors settled shut, and silence rushed in, fraught and tense. Alois stood, spine rigid, hands clenched at his sides.

Isabella surveyed him. One blue nail tapped the hilt of the knife. Her eyes were steel-gray, unblinking. She wore shirtsleeves rolled to her elbows, exposing corded, scarred forearms. Her fitted waistcoat was the dark blue of a soldier's uniform, her shoulder-length hair shining like buffed gold. Alois was over-aware of his filthy clothes, the suppressed tremble in his legs.

He forced himself to stay upright despite the bitter taste in his mouth. The world pitched and tilted around him; he'd been so long in the cell, so long in the dark. He'd already begun to forget what freedom felt like. Maybe he was a fool to pretend he'd ever known.

"Sit down, Prince Alois," Isabella said at last.

Alois paused, then sat, slowly, in the chair opposite her desk. Pain flared in his aching muscles; he let his eyes drift shut for a moment, savoring the chair's padded leather, the cool breeze teasing aside the drapes. When he opened his eyes again, a servant was bringing him a cup, Buyani porcelain painted with a delicate design of leaping fish.

He could have wept at the sight of water, but paused before he drank. It wasn't water inside the cup, but dark liquid that smelled of unfamiliar herbs.

"What is it?" he rasped, glancing up at Isabella.

She arched an eyebrow. "Tea."

"What's in it?"

"Leaves," she said. "And a squeeze of lemon. Don't worry. We tend not to poison our prisoners here in Lapide."

At the mention of poison and prisoners, Alois's pulse jumped. "Where are my guards?"

"Alive."

Alois let out his breath, relief flooding through him. At least his guards hadn't had to pay with their lives for his father's ambition. "Are you going to execute me?"

"Do you want to be executed?"

Alois held her gaze, tried to stay aloof, but it was useless. Poisoned or not, he couldn't go a moment longer without a drink. He raised the tea to his lips and drained the cup in two long swallows. The tea was chilled, flavored with mint and rich spices, so good he thought about asking for more. He fought off the impulse and lowered the cup.

"I don't know," he said, after a moment. "Maybe I should be."

"Because of my sister?"

Ache twisted in Alois's chest. "I swear to you, I swear on Bellana's mercy I did not know what my father was planning. I want peace as much as I know you do. I want Lapide and Estara united. I didn't want...I never wanted..."

His traitor eyes blurred, and Isabella dissolved into smears of blue and gold. Alois lowered his gaze, unwashed curls falling over his eyes. He clenched the Buyani cup so hard his hands hurt, knuckles white through his skin.

"I am not going to execute you, Prince Alois," Isabella said. "Because I believe you."

Alois jerked his head up. "What?"

Isabella drew a long breath, then reached into the desk. She emerged with a small enameled box. A hand seemed to tighten around Alois's heart as Isabella opened the box and produced a tiny bottle of clear liquid from within.

"This was in your trunk," she said. She set the bottle onto the desk, next to the knife. It caught a glint of lamplight. "Hidden in a panel at the bottom."

"That's..." Alois started. His mouth was dry again, a high ringing in his ears. "You...you can't. Please-"

"It's medicine," Isabella said. "A tincture of moon tears and laylock. For the eyes, isn't it."

Alois couldn't lie to her. "Yes."

"You're going blind."

Her words were a strike to the face, his father's palm cracking against his cheek. They were shame, black and hot and unending, a howl inside him that threatened to consume him. The room seemed at once airless. Like she'd summoned them, gray spots swam in Alois's vision, a haze that grew larger each time he suffered them, eating up more and more of his sight.

"Yes," Alois said again.

"Estaran customs are strange and violent beasts, especially when concerning kings. No matter how suited you are to the position, Prince Alois, this-" She tapped the vial. "-qualifies you as unfit to rule. Am I wrong?"

"No."

"Your father has remarried, yes? Had another son? Another heir, more to his satisfaction than his first attempt?"

"Marin." Another fist around the heart, another pang of pain. Where was his little brother now? Safe, he hoped. Let him be safe, let him be well, let him be free of their father's plans. Frustration built like a scream. He felt so powerless.

"How tidy for him," Isabella said. She plucked up the whaleglass knife, turning it this way and that. "To hamstring Lapide and be rid of you in the same maneuver. Brilliant, I would even say, if it weren't so monstrous."

"He's right to want Marin on the throne," Alois said quickly. "I am unfit. This...affliction, this curse-"

"Curse. Like Cereza was cursed?" Her tone was sharp, knuckles white on the knife's hilt. Another wave of shame crashed across Alois. He wished he could curl in on himself, to cancel his own flesh and make himself nothing. "Don't mistake me, Alois. You are on enemy ground now."

Captain Acier shifted slightly, his signet ring chiming against the hilt of his sword. He had an quick laugh in the Palace gardens the evening of Alois' arrival, had kindly teased Cereza and Luca as much as they'd done so in return, had greeted Alois with an easy smile, no trace of mistrust. A careful show, maybe, but Alois had been relieved nonetheless. All of that was gone now. From the chill in his eyes Alois knew it was only his princess's command that kept him from drawing steel and running him through where he sat.

"I realize that," Alois said carefully. "And I am...grateful for your mercy. I only wish it weren't necessary."

"I know," Isabella said, and for the first time Alois heard a trace of softness in her voice. "That's why you're alive now, Highness, and not swinging from a sea gibbet for your countrymen to find."

Alois swallowed. The tea tasted bitter on the back of his tongue.

"I have no desire to see Lapide consumed in your father's fires," Isabella went on. "And I am not so naive that I don't see my mother's lapse into despair. I must rectify what has been done, as I cannot count on my queen to do so for me."

"There's no lifting the curse," Alois said.

Isabella's eyes narrowed. "I'm not speaking of the curse. Not entirely."

"Then what?"

"My brother," Isabella said, "has stolen Cereza, the shadow-thief assassin, and a treasure of the Valere house in a madcap mission to find the Great Leviathan."

Alois dropped the cup. The crack of breaking porcelain startled him from his chair. He stood as the servants swooped to clear away the shards. Isabella had not flinched. When the maids were finished, she dismissed them with a nod, and they retreated into a hidden door in the paneling of the walls.

"No," Alois said. His head swam, but he fought for clarity. 'That's...no, that's impossible..."

"My thoughts exactly."

It's gone, Alois. It's been gone long before anyone alive was born. If it is returning, it's not in these times. His mother's face, her amber eyes sorrowful, looking not at him but past him. He'd followed her gaze across the sea, to the point where sky and ocean met. The stars had been fires, then, a thousand thousand of them, so bright and heavy they might have fallen to the waves, sinking to the depths of the dark water.

These are no days for gods.

She might have dreamed of the Leviathan, she might have ached to see it, but now she never would. Maybe all the secrets she'd craved had been answered for her, when she met Bellana's light. Maybe the goddess whispered the truths in her ear. Alois didn't know. He didn't lately have much trust in gods.

"What's to be done?" Alois said.

"I cannot afford to send men after him. Lapide is full of rot. A crack in our country, made by war and widened by the events of the past weeks. I need my strength gathered here, in Lapide's heart. And if my mother will not stand strong, I must in her place."

"Unrest?" Somehow Alois didn't think she meant riots.

Isabella's face was a mask, but a flicker passed through her eyes. Fear, Alois thought. Somehow that was worse than the news of Prince Luca and his madness, Cereza's curse and their loosed monster.

Rot, Alois thought. Like dread marrowworms that ate a sea-ork beneath the skin, swimming in its brain until the beast was no more than a parasite's puppet. A whole and hale thing, turned black and crawling on the inside.

"What I say now remains here, in this room," Isabella said. She set the knife down. "Do you understand me?"

He was in no position to deny her. He was in no position to deny anyone anything. He was not prince anymore; he was nothing, a game piece that had expended its purpose. Had the Witchhunter known, too? Somehow, that was worse than the knowledge his father had betrayed him. Had Azare plotted this scheme with King Daval, heads bent together, constructing their new empire on foundations of his blood?

Of course he had, Alois told himself, bitter. He was the Witchhunter. His loyalties were to Estara, not to him, no matter how many times he'd shielded Alois from his father's wrath.

"Yes," Alois said. "I understand."

"There is a traitor in Lapide," Isabella said. "I don't know who. I don't know for what reward. But locks were left open, and correspondence given of the Palace's layout, that allowed the assassin access to Cereza. This has been planned for far longer, and with far greater reach, than I originally could have anticipated."

A muscle twitched in her jaw. "I had thought Lapide impermeable, its people united. I was wrong."

"Loyalty only goes so far."

"Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I was...naive. But no longer. I do not intend Lapide to float belly to the sun, helpless to hungry gulls. I do not spare mercy for traitors. When I find who allowed this, who conspired with Estara, who betrayed my country, I will burn them out."

"You sound like my father."

Isabella narrowed her eyes. "I don't want an empire. I only want my country united. I only want this war to end."

We all want what we think is best, Alois thought. And did he want the same? Or did it go deeper, further, a desire to be born again and live in a different skin, to stand without fear? Or to cut down his fears, to look into his father's eyes and hear him beg forgiveness, to look into his father's eyes and watch them dull as he slipped a knife into a king's heart?

Vengeance and violence, blood in the water. That was his father's way, and he was his father's son. Maybe it was his way, too.

"And what do you want with me?" Alois said.

"Your help," Isabella said. "And your support, when the day comes that Lapide and Estara are united again. Not under an empire, but as allies."

Allies. What a sea of jagged rocks lay between reality and her dream. But deep inside Alois, a spark guttered- not fear, not acceptance, but defiance. His father had thrown him to the sea-orks, and he had survived.

He rubbed his thumb over the scar on his palm, the one he'd inflicted himself, healed to a shadow by the power of the Belmont cup.

To heal, not to hurt.

I am your heir, Father. This is what you have made.

He would not be Daval's game piece. He'd see the world Isabella spoke of made real, the world his father would have broken. He would not simply see it. He would make it so.

Alois lowered his eyes, brow furrowed, then raised them and met Isabella's steel gaze once more. Not friends, but allies.

He nodded. "I can start with that."

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 10- Azare

***

Word came with the dawn: a missive under the swift flag, traveling from Lapide across Bellana's Arm.

An ill omen, Azare thought. He folded the paper once more and looked to the king. Daval faced the sea and an early morning sky slashed with red. Best to make plans by evening, when Bellana's exhausted her wrath for the day. Not morning, when she hasn't yet begun.

"Then it's done," Azare said.

"It's done." Daval's hands were clasped behind his back. He looked, in the dawn, like one of the statues along the sea walk, his handsome face expressionless. "Your assassin used the knife. The princess carries its curse. Now, all we must do is prepare."

"Queen Sofia Valere has killed your men. Taken Prince Alois as a war prisoner."

"As expected."

As expected. A phrase cold as the executioner's blow. He was as much a reason for their deaths as Daval, had schemed alongside his king for this precise result. Had he also expected triumph? No, his heart was too guarded for that, and Daval would not rest until Lapide was in chains at his feet. This was the first link, the first of many, and if it meant a triumphant Estara in the end, Daval would do far more than sacrifice his disappointing first-born son.

Estaran kings knew the power of sacrifice centuries ago when the splay of fresh entrails on stone wrote certain futures. This king had been preparing his own tithe for a long time, as long as it had taken him to realize his son was unfit to rule, to find a new queen and breed a new heir, one he could train without the interference of a strong-willed queen. Alois was far too much Margaux's son, and it had cost him. How we mock the innocent. Maybe once Azare had dreamed of more, but there was no room for doubt in him now, not at the crux of Estara's final victory.

Then why think of Margaux, her words rising thick and fast, like some ghost clung to his heart?

"You did well, Severin," Daval said. He looked over his shoulder and smiled. "Like I knew you would. And there's no breaking the curse?"

"No." Azare had overseen the tests conducted on prisoners in the deep war halls carved into the cliffs beneath the Tower. Black rooms, chains, the choked wheeze of dying men. Himself, striding between rows upon rows of cell doors, watching with eyes narrowed at the unnatural death that surrounded him. The whaleglass knife did more than wound; on the contrary, a wound inflicted by the knife would not kill. Not at first. It leached life, stealing piece by piece, sapping the strength of the victim until they became too weak to stand, too weak to crawl, wracked with pain and fear until they at last gave out. A cruel and lingering death.

Lapide's beloved princess would die that way, a young girl's life stolen, heart blackened and crystallized from the inside out.

He had done that. He had ordered that. He'd wrought that fate, as much as if he'd held the knife himself.

What would Margaux say? He saw the disgust on her face like she stood before him, not Daval. She would fly at him, all anguish and stinging words. He'd deserve every one.

For Estara, he told himself, for Estara, for Estara.

Lapide would crumble. There was no question. It would fall: first their queen and then her country, one after the next, like game pieces. Once they had, Daval would advance and sweep the board clean. No longer a sundered empire, but an Estaran empire, Daval Belmont at last reigning sovereign over all.

All it took was a knife, and a girl's heart to sheathe it in. All it took was Alois's life.

"Good." Daval faced him. A blast of sea wind swept the walk, ruffling Daval's gray-streaked hair. "Severin, I know you were always fond of my son. But you are loyal to me."

"Always."

"I hold that loyalty dear," Daval said. "And it grows more valuable than ever in the coming time. When my empire rises, so do you."

"I'm honored by your trust."

Daval clapped his hand to Azare's shoulder. "Alois is as good as dead. He's served his purpose, and now we must serve ours. You know that, don't you."

"Of course I do."

"As well as you know your place?"

"My place is as ever by your side."

His grip tightened on Azare's shoulder. "Come now, Severin," he said. "We both know that wasn't always true."

Azare took a slow breath. Daval's dark eyes were narrowed, full of steel and cold as the depths of the sea, where so many soldiers on both sides of this war had drowned. Azare could imagine Daval's next words like he was some witch, to whisper into being the thoughts of others.

Once, you were weak.

Once, you took more than you had the rights to.

Once, I know, something burned stronger for you than Estara.

Far below, waves crashed and boomed. Seabirds scattered on the high winds, pale scraps tossed against a bloody sky.

"The past is the past," Azare muttered, his voice rough.

"Is it," Daval said.

He released Azare's shoulder. It ached with the force of his grip. "Kneel."

Azare drew his Witchhunter's blade and sank to one knee, his head bowed. Another gust of salt wind swept past them both, drowning the memory of snowbloom, of what once might have devoured Estara from the inside out.

Let it stay there. Let it die there along with all my weakness, all my betrayals.

Once, he'd committed treason with a song in his heart.

He will kill us-

I don't care. Words that freed him, words that drowned him. How happily he'd let the waters close over his head. I don't care.

Alois's eyes were so like his mother's. Would they dull like the queen's had? Would he join her, wherever her ghost drifted, far from this world, far from Azare's reach? It was his only consolation to pray Bellana would embrace them both.

He offered his sword to his king. Daval made no move to take it, no move to use it on him. "Look at me," Daval commanded. Azare raised his head. "You know what must be done. For Estara. For all of us. More than one man. More than you, or me, or the dead. That is what matters. Legacy. Estara's legacy. The liberation of our people, an end to their suffering. They look to you as much as to me. And I will not see them bow to Lapide. Not now. Not ever."

Daval nodded, a hard jerk of his head. "Rise, Witchhunter."

Azare did, slowly. The sword in his hands caught the red gleam of the sky, and for a moment it seemed sheathed in blood. Alois's, the princess's- it was of no consequence. Daval was right. Estara was what mattered, the lives of the many, not those Azare clung so selfishly to.

He slid his sword home in its scabbard. "My king. I am at your command."

"Then come on, Sev, and show me how I'll win my empire," Daval said. "Take me to the dreadnoughts. "

Azare glanced to the ocean, to the warships visible at the edge of the sea border. Maybe Bellana's wrath had come after all.

Maybe this was her hand, as much as Daval's.

They left the sunrise for the shadowy depths of Pavaloir Tower- not the halls of politic and strategy, not the dead queen's gardens and the court strolling under martyr boughs, but deeper, through metal doors only the king's or Azare's presence could open. They descended long spills of stairs into echoing darkness. Around them, the air grew so cold Azare could see his breath in it. Trench-darkness, this place, no memory left of sunlight or sea wind. These halls were black stone so highly polished Azare's reflection walked, spectral, alongside him. Even the air seemed dead in these depths, windless and frigid, far from the sun and sky.

A shadow detached itself from the wall as they approached a pair of metal doors. A woman, in Witchhunter grays. Her curly black hair gleamed in the lamplight, a shade lighter than her Witchhunter uniform. It sprung in a halo about a pert, sly face, all tilted eyes and rounded edges nicked with scars. Ziva Lapin, Azare's second-in-command these seven years, and his soldier for longer still.

"Lieutenant Lapin," Azare said.

"Captain." She gave him a nod, then bowed low for Daval. "Your Majesty."

"I hear you've been overseeing construction while your captain and I discuss weddings," Daval said.

A grin hooked the corner of Ziva's mouth. "Weddings, wartime. Both make for a fine show folk nevertheless can't wait to see the end of. The work's nearly done, Majesty."

He clapped her on the arm. "That's what I want to hear, Lapin."

She pressed a control by the twin metal doors. They were plain steel studded with star-shaped bolts, set deep in within the Tower, far enough down the hiss and boom of the waves became a low, omnipresent roar in the walls, underfoot, in the air itself, in the pit of Azare's skull.

Gears ground in the walls, and the doors slid open. Inside was an iron cage, illuminated by a pair of lamps bolted to the walls, beaming harsh blue-white orklight.

Daval entered without hesitation. Ziva gave Azare a glance and an arched eyebrow. He nodded in assurance, then followed.

The doors slid shut, trapping them off from the black Tower depths. With a shudder and the high keen of machinery, the cage began its descent. Estaran engineers had made this place, Pavaloir's ancient Guild of Iron and its highest thinkers, alchemists and scholars and the makers of war machines, those who sought to rival even the warrior Saints in their potential for bloodshed. It was here the warships and spellfire bolts of the King's Navy were forged, here the witch-weave armor of its soldiers was born, providing protection against even the worst Lapide could do.

"What you are about to see, Majesty, is a work in progress," Azare began. "But I think the full scope will be apparent."

Daval shifted from foot to foot, back and forth, restless. "And the engines?"

"Refined ork-oil," Azare said. "Less volatile. A hundred times the power of impure crude. This armada will be unstoppable."

Gears caught, and the lift ground to a halt. The doors slid open, and forth came the smoky fumes of hot metal and ork-oil, the bitter sting of alchemic forges and spellfire. Daval strode onto the metal balcony. It looked down, and down, echoes lost in the roar of the forges below. Spellfire glowed the hot blue of a summer sky, illuminating the cavern heights of the War Hall.

These halls had been excavated from the vast natural sea caves beneath Pavaloir, their upper limits left raw and clustered with stalactites. Lower, a grid of stark light illuminated the forges, vast swells of riveted iron pouring forth tongues of spellfire, pouring forth armor. Sheets and plates of it, hammered to sheathe the flanks of the warships.

Warships, Azare thought. That was a weak word for what they were- there were no warships like these in all the oceans. Even half-built, their scaffolds standing naked and silhouetted black amidst cascades of welding sparks, they were monstrous, bows equipped with ramming spikes sized to impale sea-orks, hulls bristling with cannon-slits and armored niches for alchemic bolts. Each stood a hundred feet high in their berths, chained into place like fighting beasts. Countless technicians and machinists in Guild black hammered, and welded, and worked the forges, carrying steel to the spellfire to be made into yet more armor, more guns.

The Estaran fellfox snarled across each bow. Now, though, it held not a sword in its teeth, but Lapide's crown crushed between its jaws. This was no mere fleet, but an armada to forge empires.

"Bellana give me strength," Daval breathed.

He stepped to the edge of the railing, staring down at the warships. Two waited in this hall alone; there were two halls more. Six dreadnoughts in total, six warships equipped with enough firepower to blast Lapide from the map. Maybe with its queen at the head, Lapide might survive. It might gather its navy; it might find a way. Sofia Valere was a fellfox herself, a force to be reckoned with. But with the queen lain low, with her country reeling and raw, with Estara's assassin able to strike them to the heart, they could not hope to stand in Daval's way.

"How long?" Daval's eyes shone blue in the light of the forges. "How long until they're finished?"

"Weeks, Majesty," said Ziva. She cut her eyes to Azare, then away again, just as fast. "Weeks, and they'll be watertight. Ready to sail. Ready for your hand, your command. Ready to dance a pavane if that's what you want."

"And I'll be ready too." He looked to Azare. "You remember the parable of Bellana's Saints, Sev?"

"Of course I do." His father and Daval's alike had made well certain they knew Bellana's books, Bellana's word, written on their hearts as much as vellum.

"The Sky-Queen, trapped in her wars against the beasts of the deep ocean," Daval recited, soft and reverent. "Unable to break free of the horrors that beset her. So she reached out, and when she had reached far enough, she gave. Mortals, flesh given fire, as of the hearts of falling stars. Saints, made to fight in her stead against a sea of horrors, an unjust world. And they were as gods, using their holy fire in service of Bellana, yes, but moreso in service of those who were not given the same."

He lifted his head, bathed in the spellfire glow, in the heat shimmer and waiting death. He might have truly been Leaure, warrior Saint reborn, guided by the hand of Bellana herself.

All save for the look in his eyes. Azare watched him, watched the look in them, the longing, like a soldier's at sunrise. Like a child's. He remembered Daval as a boy. Both of them as boys, young and frightened and doing their best to hide it. Dust in their lungs, the sting of dawn as they stood at clifftop. The first cast of gold light over the waves.

Daval's eyes narrowed against the sunlight as he looked through it, past it. He had the same look now. The same longing.

Bellana's mercy. Such a long time.

"We'll be gods, Severin," Daval said, and laughed, softly. "Gods."

And Azare was back, and that sunrise was gone, and the years returned to him, and to Daval. He was right. Only gods could hate like them. Only gods could kill like they would, the seas turned red, not with dawn, but with blood, all the way to the horizon.

***

The Witchhunter training rooms occupied a flank of Pavaloir Tower, a single bastion spire that had housed the order of Witchhunters since the days of the Sundered Empire. The tower jutted overhead, casting dense shadow across the rooftops, its sharp finial visible through the high windows of the training rooms.

Echoing white halls, they rang this time of morning with the peal and scream of blade on blade, shouts and thuds as fists and wood connected with flesh. Azare had trained here, a boy with eyes narrowed in concentration, his father at his back as he and Daval sparred and clashed. Now Witchhunter cadets fought against each other, sweat darkening their white uniforms, higher-ranking Witchhunters who'd earned their grays patrolling to examine form or bark a command. All stopped to click heels as Azare and Ziva entered, dozens of heads bowed and hands clasped to hearts, weapons lowered, drills halted.

"Sir," cadets called, and Azare nodded, his eyes fixed straight. He felt pent-up, like some wild animal trapped to pace in its cage, and knew that if he spoke it would be to snap. He headed through the halls, searching for one sparsely occupied. He felt Ziva's presence needle at his back. She had a way of doing that, of making it known when she had more she wanted to say.

They reached a hall empty save for a pair of cadets drilling disarms. "On your way," Ziva commanded, and they bowed and marched out, poorly hiding their stares in Azare's direction.

Azare pulled loose the fastenings of his coat and slung it in a corner. He worked his arm- his right shoulder had a way of aching when summer came, an old injury pulling at his bones- and paced to the racks of weapons hanging on the far wall. It was a museum of war: blunted blades and training swords weighted with lead, thin snakeknives, wicked stiletto daggers in the Lapidaean style to better prepare recruits against their enemy's fighting techniques. Shields, too, bucklers and spellforged towers of metal, such that would shrug off rifle fire. Sabers and poleaxes and sword-breakers, even long whips, such as the fighting warrior-priestesses of Belamere used. Witchhunter recruits came from all across Estara's sister isles, and they brought their ways of killing with them.

Azare brushed his thumb to the hilt of a snakeknife. Not so ornate as Margaux's had been, not by half, but the shape was the same, the blade thin as a needle.

"Captain," Ziva called.

She stood opposite him. The morning sunlight poured through the west-facing windows, but where she and Azare stood, the room was bathed in shadow, still full of the night's chill. "You feel like hitting something?" she asked.

She held a pair of long staffs reinforced with steel, weighted to crack skulls. Her sleeves were rolled up, showing bare, muscular forearms gleaming like bronze in the sun. She spun the staffs and held one out. "I know I do."

Azare rolled up his own sleeves and nodded. She tossed a staff; he caught it, spun it, slammed its end into the ground. Chalk dust billowed.

"Remember not to leave your left side open," he called.

"Come now, sir. I haven't-"

He sprang before her sentence ended, whirling the staff; wood cracked against wood as Ziva caught his blow on the shaft between her hands. Her eyes sprang wide, then narrowed as a grin curled her lips. She shoved hard, throwing her weight against his. He was taller, but she had stability, and Azare threw himself back before she could shove him off balance.

Wood whirred; he looked up and jerked away as her staff flashed for his side. His left side, he noted wryly, batting her next strike away with his staff's off end. She paced, panting, a loose curl fallen over her forehead.

"What was that again, sir?" she said, puffing the strand away.

"You're gripping the staff too tight."

"Don't want to drop it on accident."

She jerked toward him: a feint. He jabbed back, connecting with flesh. She cried out, lashed out, real anger glinting in her eyes. Azare stumbled back, Ziva's attack a whirling onslaught of steel and wood and bared teeth. Azare ducked, dodged, dropped; his staff struck her ankle, and she half-tripped, attack interrupted. Enough. Azare brought his staff against her throat, wood kissing the skin of her neck.

Ziva jolted, chin raised, eyes wide. Sweat glistened on her brown skin. He felt the ferocious beat of his own heart, the ache in his shoulder; he hadn't realized how much it hurt until now.

"That was close," he said. "Almost got me."

"Almost, sir?"

Cold pricked through his shirt. Ziva's bared teeth became a grin. Azare glanced down: her plain bone-handled knife was out and poised under his last rib, angled upward toward his heart.

Azare gave a choked laugh, then lifted his staff and stepped back. "You win."

She sketched an elaborate bow. "I win."

"You're still gripping the staff too tight," he called, going to the spigot in the wall to drink and splash cold water through his hair. He let his breath out. The ache had leveled out around a deep pulse in his muscle, like a new bruise.

"Captain," Ziva said.

He looked round.

"Are you all right?"

There was a crease between her eyes, one she only got when she was worried over him. She did that too much.

"I'm fine."

Ziva eyed him, clearly disbelieving, then shook her head. "You look exhausted."

He wasn't the only one. Her skin had an ashen cast, the lines of her heart-shaped face gaunt. Again he felt that pull in his heart, like an old wound. "War does little for the complexion."

"What about victory?"

He didn't answer. She set her staff back in its stand and crossed to him. She reached out, as if for a strand of damp auburn hair that had fallen over Azare's face, then stopped, and pulled away. Azare saw the movement in her throat as she swallowed. "Saints, this is like a dream, isn't it? I can barely believe it."

She let out a laugh, wild as gull-cry. "It's a bloody miracle is what it is."

"I wouldn't call this a miracle."

Ziva's brows arched. "No? What else would you call it? I've seen so many soldiers die. So much Estaran blood fed to the waves."

She grinned. "The witch-queen brought low, and Lapide with her. I don't know what meter you have for miracles, but for me..."

Her dark eyes glowed, struck by the light slanting through the high windows. She took a sharp breath, lifting her face to the day. Her hand strayed to her side, to the plain knife, again sheathed. She always kept it at her fingertips. Its sweat-worn bone grip hardly matched her sleek Witchhunter grays. It didn't matter. Azare would no sooner tell her to stop wearing it than tell the sun to not rise with the dawn.

"So many years," she said. "So much lost. Everything I've fought for has been for this. Not for killing, sir, not for bloody Lapide. For us. For Estara. Everything we've fought for, bled for. Everything we've lost. To see Estara rise again."

What we've lost, Azare thought, studying her as she spoke, as she shifted her weight from foot to foot as if she itched to lunge back into combat. Ziva had lost more than most. Before becoming a Witchhunter, she was one of Estara's countless orphans in a plague of twenty-five years ago that had swept across the sister isles, sparing none it touched. She'd survived, a mere child, though her family had not. Daval's father had succumbed to that plague, leaving him the crown. A nation crying for vengeance was his inheritance. He was ready, and so was Ziva, hungry for her nation's victory, to grind Lapide into the dirt.

For all it had stolen.

For all it had taken away.

For all it had killed in its cradle, killed before it began.

"Everything we've fought for," Azare murmured.

Ziva looked at him again, and this time didn't avert her eyes. Azare wanted- it didn't matter. There was work to be done. And there was his own weak heart, his own shame. He could not sling that weight onto Ziva's back. How would she look at him if she knew the truth?

Not like this. Not with sunlight in her eyes.

She smiled with that fishhook of a grin. "You really do look tired, Captain," she said, and reached for his face, her fingertips light on his skin.

He caught her hand before she could touch him. He felt the way he trembled, and hated it, this part of himself he couldn't control. Azare closed his eyes. He felt Ziva's pulse through her wrist, pressed tight to his.

What are you waiting for? Margaux had whispered once as they'd danced slow and close in candlelit dark. Lips, and mingling breath, and ache, then and now. What are you waiting for, Severin?

What did he wait for now? The end of the war? Daval's empire? A dead woman, bones in a tomb?

Azare opened his hand. Ziva pulled away from him, head bowed. He would wait forever if he had to. Only if Estara sank beneath the waves would he betray his duty again.

For Estara, he vowed, turning from his lieutenant. There was no pull in his heart this time, and  his ghosts at last stayed silent.

[thetoots]

• Not normally a big fruit beer fan but this was a lot of fun. Tastes just like alcoholic raspberry lemonade. • Pink Lemonade IPA collab by @eviltwinbrewing and @omnipollo. Purchased on Tavour. • #beer #craftbeer #beerporn #craftbeerporn #ipa #beermail #craftbeerlover #craftbeerlife #craftbeervigilantes #begforjuno #craftnotcrap #untappd @beerexchangeio #teku #whalezglass #whaleglass (at San Leandro, California)

[thetoots]

• No cultivating a love for this one. It’s great from the moment you crack it. • Growers Pale Ale by Monterey Countie’s @alvaradostreetbrewery. Purchased at @cooler1517 in San Leandro. • #beer #craftbeer #paleale #craftbeerlife #craftbeerlover #craftbeerporn #beerporn #craftnotcrap @beerexchangeio #whaleglass #whalezglass #teku #untappd #craftbeervigilantes #begforjuno (at San Leandro, California)

[thetoots]

• Scored some more of this tasty brew. Drinking great even being 2mo old. • 3-Way IPA collaboration @fortgeorgebeer @reubensbrews @greatnotionpdx. Delivered by @tavour. • #begforjuno #craftbeervigilantes #craftbeerlife #crafbeerporn #beerporn #craftbeer #craftbeerlover #craftnotcrap #untappd #teku #ipa #pnw #whalezglass #whaleglass @beerexchangeio #juicy #collaboration (at San Leandro, California)