Only the foolhardy and desperate ever sailed the Devourer now that there were airships. There had been, for a long time, a high portal tax and a thriving transport business in flying outworlders to the island that wasn’t really an island, but a cut tezerl stalk—one of the vast white stalks that grew out of the sea. They used to come to buy magical children. It wasn’t a secret. No one in Var Elient could afford them themselves, but they had relied on the tax and the transport revenue. And then it all came to an end.
They blamed Nova, as well they might, since she was the one who crashed a stolen kite skiff on the island, slew the guards, and took over, killing on sight anyone who came after, and collecting their airships like it was a portal harbor.
But it wasn’t really her fault. The portal, which was Var Elient’s al-Meliz door, had closed before she got there, and stayed closed. Skathis’s auctions were over.
She had found three children in cages and freed them, but she had only freed them so far. She might have taken them somewhere else—anywhere else—so they could have some other life. But she chose to stay, and what could they do? She made the choice for them all, so that she could be near the portal when it reopened, as she never doubted it would.
And that is how Kiska, Werran, and Rook became pirates of the Devourer—“pirates” in the nonmagical sense—and grew up boarding and seizing airships over the roiling red sea. Perhaps Nova had bowed to fate, and determined to embody the word that defined her.
They were loyal to her in the blind way of saved children, but as they came home from Zeru in the godsmetal warship, they were not quite as blind as they had been before.
“That was Minya,” Kiska said under her breath as Nova guided the seraph down to their island, to moor it as though it were just another ship they’d seized for their fleet. “We just stole this ship from Minya.”
Werran shook his head. He might have believed it was her for a moment, but it was deniable after the fact. “How could it be? She’d be our age.” He was holding one arm gingerly against him, his wrist a mess from his ghost bite. “Whoever that was, was just a little girl.”
“Maybe she was Minya’s daughter,” said Rook. The math would have had her giving birth at fourteen or fifteen, which was uncomfortable, but not impossible.
“Don’t be stupid. You both know it was her.”
“So what if it was?” asked Werran with a belligerence born of discomfiture. “What are we supposed to do about it now?”
“Go back?” suggested Kiska, hugging her arms around herself and pacing. She’d shut off her gravity boots and they clicked against the metal floor with each step. “Make sure they’re all right?” The words all right nearly stuck in her throat. She darted an uneasy glance in Lazlo’s direction. He was lying deathly still with the crook of his arm flung across his face, concealing it. If what he had been saying— screaming—was true, then they were not all right.
“We can’t go back,” said Rook.
“Why not?” Kiska stopped pacing. “We have plenty of ships.”
“That’s hardly the point,” he said, shooting a look toward Nova. There was a pounding in the base of his skull, and his joints ached and his fingers were numb from the lightning blast that had thrown him. It reminded him of being five years old, in a cage, with guards teaching him what to be afraid of. Nova had freed him from that.
They all watched her and fell silent. She hadn’t said a word during the entire transition between worlds, and they hadn’t bothered her, for the ostensible reason that she had to concentrate to pilot the immense ship through the narrow gap. But that wasn’t the only reason. They didn’t like to admit it, even to themselves, but they were worried.
There was something unknowable and untouchable about Nova. They’d lived with her for most of their lives, but not for most of hers. They were twenty, twenty-one. She was…well, they didn’t know, but she was old. Her life reached deep into a past they couldn’t imagine. What they knew of her was like…like rain on the lid of a cistern. They couldn’t even see the dark water below, much less guess what it held. And sometimes her eyes were faraway, and sometimes they were murderous. She could be funny, and she could cut throats, and she could sink into silence for days. But whatever else she was, she was, above all, single-minded.
Nova had a purpose, or she’d had a purpose: to find her sister. So what would she do now?
The ship—citadel, seraph—came to a stop, and Nova moved for the first time in many minutes. She’d been floating out in the center of the room, the white bird gliding its endless circles around her, but now she turned and came toward where they were waiting in the door. Lazlo still lay on the walkway, and Kiska was glad to see Nova free him.
For all of half a second.
She released his legs from the metal, and he felt it, and flung his arm off his face to come upright, but even as he rose, two masses of godsmetal, each as big as his head, detached from the walkway and flew up to meld themselves around his upper arms and shoulders and lift him into the air so that he was suspended, feet dangling. “Let me go!” he said, hoarse from all his futile screaming. Nova went around him and he tried to grab at her but couldn’t reach, and she didn’t seem to notice or hear him holler. She just floated him along behind her.
Kiska, Rook, and Werran were three abreast in the doorway. They’d have to step aside to let her pass, but for the moment none of them moved. They looked from Lazlo’s grief-ravaged face to Nova’s, which was very weary, and…blankly benign. The wrongness of it held them all rooted as she slowed to a stop before them, waiting for them to step out of her way.
Why wasn’t she grieving?
Though they’d been fearing the form her grief would take, this clear lack of it was jarring. Not to mention seeing her cavalierly take control of a young man who was, well, one of them. They didn’t know him, but what did that matter? He was innocent, not to mention that he bore more than a passing resemblance to Werran and was probably his brother. Nova freed slaves; she didn’t take them. And of course it was even worse than that, if what Lazlo said was true: By taking this ship and leaving the others behind—who were also their kin and kindred—they had doomed at least one of them.
“Nova,” said Kiska in an uncertain tone. “What are you going to do with him?”
“Do?” Nova regarded Lazlo. “Well, I suppose that depends on him. I always planned to keep Skathis in a birdcage.”
That didn’t answer the question. They would have helped her keep Skathis in a birdcage. “But he’s not Skathis,” Kiska pointed out.
“No, but he is a Mesarthim smith, and that is a very rare treasure.”
“Treasure?” repeated Rook. In the course of their piracy, they had looted many a treasure, but they had never stolen people. Having been rescued from the certainty of slavery themselves, the very thought was anathema to them. “But you can’t just keep him,” he blurted, as though nothing were more obvious.
“I have to,” said Nova. “I need him if I’m going to find Kora.”
Rook’s mouth opened and then closed again. There was a moment of stunned silence, which Nova took advantage of to move past them, pushing between Rook and Kiska, who stood as though their boots were magnetized to the floor, even as Lazlo was pulled past, struggling, the bird following in their wake.
In a low voice, Werran asked Kiska, “You’re sure Korako’s dead?” After all, he and Rook hadn’t heard the mind chorus of dead she’s dead she’s dead, or seen the memory of the knife going into her heart the way Kiska had.
“Very sure,” she replied, chilled to her core.
“Then what was that about?” asked Werran. They all felt as though some fundamental truth had been yanked out from under them, leaving them in free fall.
“She’s lost it,” said Rook. “Did you see her eyes? That’s madness.”
“It’s grief,” said Kiska. “It’s shock.”
“It’s kidnapping,” said Werran. “It’s slavery.”