books-of-the-great-leviathan

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 51- Sirin

***

With the Leviathan's resurrection, her power had settled again into its familiar cycle: day and night, sleeping and waking. At noon, she sat on the schooner's deck, one leg dangling over the bowsprit, and stared at the sun, remembering the devastation of her power, remembering the unsounded depths of it.

It scraped at her, this binding, this balance. It howled, her grief. Destroyer, destroyer, she told herself, and yearned for shadows.

But that power was driving her fingers deeper into the wound, not sealing it. It was driving her hand into her own chest and tearing out her heart. Nothing healed that way.

Was this voyage to be another wound? As the trim, black-and-yellow schooner cut over the waves, as the seas grew darker and those waves grew colder, Sirin felt dread mount inside her, and the question went unanswered.

"We can still turn around," Luca told her one night on the icy deck. They held teacups close to their faces to stay warm, the sky a canopy of cold, distant stars. The ship that bore them was built by Luca and named, of course, the Hornet. In warmer waters, the sough and snap of the billowing sails was a comforting sound, a friendly presence. Here it chilled the bones; it filled Sirin's nerves, living memory, a constant reminder of their course.

"It's not too late," Luca went on, his voice soft.

Sirin blew a plume of steam off the surface of her tea and shook her head. She stared out past the prow, over the heaving gray shoulders of the sea.

Too late, she thought.

Was sixteen years too late? The last time she had seen Alkona, it was a hazy back-cast glimpse through a porthole, the island wreathed in smoke, a black column rising ever higher into the sky. Then it was fever dreams, and nothing. Only memories had remained, and in their way they had become warped and bruised. Some faded, some sharpened. None of them were right. None of them were real. Whatever else she would find, it would not be her Alkona. Not as she dreamed it, not as she wanted it. Not as she might have made it, deep in the dark throes of the Leviathan's power.

She set down her teacup and let out her breath. Her eyes were warm. Luca reached out, his gloved hand closing over hers.

"It's all right," he told her. "Whichever way. I'll be with you nevertheless."

Sirin didn't reply. Luca sat with her long into the night, the wind growing ever colder, the spray numbing her face. At last, she squeezed his hand.

Go belowdecks, she told him. You're freezing.

"A mere pittance to pay to keep you company."

I despise you.

"Ah, but you're still here. Come with me?"

In a moment.

He nodded, and kissed her knuckles, and retreated below.

Sirin faced the horizon, shaking her hood from her hair and letting the wind play through her curls. She felt those fever dreams pulse at her again. Rock crags, and green, misted slopes, and standing stones. Ancient things, sentinels against the weather. A cave, a darkness deep beneath the earth, and the eyes of grave-dolls glimmering as if watching her. As if waiting.

Watching what? Waiting for what? A lost child, her language, her culture, herself cut away at the roots. Would they remain silent, stolen, gone forever?

She was not that child. She would never be again.

It was too late for her people, too late for her family. What did she hope to find on Alkona's shores besides bones?

Was it too late for her to come home again?

The wind and stars gave her no answers. There was no comfort in the voice of the sea. She clenched her fists, and shadow unfurled around her, a whispering veil, familiar as a lullaby. She let it enfold her. She closed her eyes, and the dark was there, too.

***

Days passed, gray and looming, their nights wild with stars and scattered ice. The Hornet kept its course, traveling north past the distant austere cliffs of the Buyani archipelago, through the thousand islands of the Ork Roads, past nameless, abandoned islets, gray and desolate, crowned with ruins and haunted by seabirds.

Their cries and the distant boom of waves shuddered deep in Sirin's bones long after the schooner passed them by.

By day, she and Luca crewed the ship together; sometimes he sang to fill the silence. Sea-shanties and reaver songs and endless Lapidaean ballads, full of clever wordplay and legendary figures from antiquity Sirin didn't know. Nights they spent huddled round the tiny coal stove belowdecks, warming their hands in turn. Luca had taken to wearing a set of spectacles, and they suited him, his crooked nose and furrowed brow and the untidy gilt gleam of his hair. They made him look older, but Sirin liked them all the better for it. Most nights he read aloud- he'd brought far too many books in a battered old sea-chest- and she listened, curled under a ship blanket, watching the dance of the firelit shadows over the walls.

The cold sharpened day by day, a blade in her lungs with each breath. Luca shivered, but Sirin savored the burn. Too long she'd breathed the muggy southern heat. This was the stark chill she craved.

One morning they spied a pod of sea-orks breaching off the port side, great, glistening backs curving from the dark waves, streaming with spume and snorting gouts of hot steam into the sky. Tusks clashed and clattered, and bellows rumbled through the deck, the sound shivering in her bones. Sirin watched them, and let herself feel the thrill of it, the fragile, living delight of the moment, these bones she lived in, the way all things convened in her to make all things what they were.

"Amazing, aren't they?" Luca said, and Sirin nodded, and meant it.

Three mornings after, she woke in her bunk to a steady ship, and hush. The waves- that was it. They were quiet on the hull. The ship had slowed.

Luca was already on deck, at the wheel. Sirin came to his side. His eyes were narrowed, his blond hair whipped back from his forehead. The headwind was a strong one, bitter with ice. The sea spread dark as ink, seamed with whitecaps. Cloud gulls chased their mast, and Sirin felt her heart seized and stricken, and knew.

An island approached fast on the horizon. Mist veiled its lower slopes, but it rose above, towering into the sky: a vast, broken double-crag, upper ramparts touched with pale sunlight. Sirin's throat tightened. She felt her powers churn inside her, a creature, a scream, longing for night, longing to hide her from its sight.

This sea remembered her, this sky. This island, Alkona. How could it not? It had tasted her blood. It had held her screams, her last screams, echoes ringing off its stones.

She grabbed for the wheel, her fist crushing around one of its pegs. Wood crackled under her hand.

"It's still not too late, Sirin," Luca told her.

She shook her head, hard. No, she thought. She had to see it. She had to know.

They drew toward the island. Mist parted, revealing sheer dark cliffs nested by colonies of countless seabirds, rockfalls and deadly crags. The broad arc of a black-sand beach opened before them, a bay torn like a jagged bite into the south-facing reaches of Alkona's shoreline.

The air tasted clean, rain and salt and bitter, like the memory of old blood on the back of Sirin's tongue.

Luca sailed closer, as close as he dared. Breakers hissed and boomed against the cliff walls, a slow, heartbeat rhythm. The tide was low, and Sirin could see the jagged points of ship-breaking rocks jutting from the water. They would be invisible come high tide, but now, here, the seas were calm. The sunlight glistened on the waves, dappling them with its pale morning light.

Sirin felt her power calm inside her, felt it turn over, and sleep. It would return, as sure as the sun would set, as sure as the moons would rise. For now, it could rest.

Still, she couldn't slow the pace of her heart, couldn't stop her hands from quivering as she and Luca dropped the anchor and readied the skiff.

They rowed in, weaving between the deadly crags. The water was deep green and clear, and Sirin could see through it as if through cloudy glass: beds of ribbon grass and kelp like great whips, caught with motes of phosphorescent algae. The current swirled, a complicated flexion of force and give, a constant, mesmerizing dance. In it, a school of tiny fish flitted past, quick and agile. They flashed silver, then dark, then silver again as the sunlight caught them. Sirin trailed her hand in the water, and they darted away, vanished once more into the depths.

At last, sand scraped the keel. Together Sirin and Luca dragged the skiff up the shore, mooring it well past the tidemark. Sirin straightened, breathing hard. A deep hush rang. The surf, the seabirds, all seemed distant, as if held behind a barrier of mist. The beach shone like polished obsidian, sand carved into ripples by the current.

She expected a wall of memories, unendurable pain. Had she fallen there? Had one of the other children stumbled over that stone, or hidden by that boulder, as if the slavers might lose them in the mist? The blood was gone, washed clean by the tide. The air no longer smelled of smoke. The hush remained.

Sirin lifted her eyes up the sand, up the border of stones at tidemark, up the cliff, patchy with green moss. A sheer wall of dark rock. Sirin made out the island's twin crags. They loomed above the mist like some floating island from a cradle song.

She began forward. Luca hung back.

"You're really going up there?" he said, nodding toward the clifftop.

Yes.

"I can stay here, if you'd rather be alone."

Sirin shook her head. Come with me. Please.

"Of course." He came to her, shedding his gloves before squinting at the cliffside. "Well. Now that looks a delight." Steps wended down the cliff, dozens of them, near-vertical in places and hacked out by hand. Sirin remembered, all at once, the scrape of her bare, callused feet over stone, the frigid ache of her toes, the burn of her muscles. Most of all, the exhilaration of making the climb in one scramble, full of mad, childish glee.

She smirked. I can go first if you're nervous, Valere.

He bowed with a flourish. "By all means. I do so love making a fool of myself around you."

And I would have it no other way. She touched his cheek. Stay close. It is a long climb, but a longer fall.

She pulled off her boots and slung them around her neck, then left the beach, left the skiff and the sound of waves, and began to climb. At first her muscles shuddered, uncertain of the effort; within minutes, though, her breathing evened, and she remembered the rhythm of the climb. Her hands slipped into holds and niches, worn by centuries of effort. Her feet found the hidden crevices and patches of grit, gaining purchase on the slick stone.

Luca followed, somewhat more ungainly. Sirin couldn't blame him. The steps had been carefully maintained when she was a child, but nearly two decades of storms and merciless wind had warped them out of shape, even collapsed them in places, and the going was slow.  

What do you think will be waiting for you, my girl? her grandmother might have said. It was no difficult thing to imagine her climbing at Sirin's side, nimble as one of the goats that ranged like wild spirits over Alkona's peaks. More ruin? More decay? Or nothing at all? That is the way of things, to forget. The storm smooths the mountainside. The tide washes the sand clean. The seas rise, and they fall, and all things go on.

Sirin clenched her teeth. That's not my way.

Then how will you go on?

I must know.

Do you think you will be forgiven?

I must know, she insisted, to her dead grandmother's memory, to herself. It had only ever been herself. I must.

The wind howled, channeled through a pair of rock markers at the clifftop. Sirin scrambled the last few yards, then helped Luca up, standing with him as he doubled over, his hands braced on his knees.

"Triune," he panted, peering over the edge. "You weren't joking. That's a long bloody way down."

Sirin turned her face to the gray sky and listened. Luca straightened with effort; she heard him come to her side. The clouds scudded over the sun, throwing the mountainside into a shifting play of sunlight, shadow. The landscape before her was all jumbled rockfall and spreading green moss, dense and springy, cut with rivulets of clear water from higher on the mountain. No sisi blossoms dotted the moss; the little yellow flowers bloomed in spring, and died by summer's end. She tasted moisture in the air, noted the way the clouds loomed, their depths a pensive gray. Later, there would be rain.

"What is it?" Luca asked.

Sirin shook her head, her throat tight behind her scar. Nothing, she signed. Nothing but silence.

They moved on, feet crunching on loose stones. The steps led them higher. Standing stones swam from the light mist, each no taller than Sirin and marking their own pathways over the mountain. Some bore bullet pits; others simply leaned like tired old women, their bases eroded by time. She touched them as she passed them by, running her hands down their damp, lichen-crusted surfaces. She set her shoulder to one leaning far enough to fall, as if she might push it back into place. She didn't, but it was good to feel the stone, to feel again this ground under her feet, familiar as a song almost forgotten.

The sun emerged from the low clouds. Shafts of sunlight hung through the mist, as if through deep water. One illuminated a humped shape, what Sirin thought for a moment was a huge fallen boulder. Drawing close, she realized her mistake.

Houses. Of course. They stood on a flank of the mountainside, a terraced plateau, a village. Her village. The last time she'd seen this place it was an inferno of flames, of screams, the goats bleating in their pens. Now, it seemed almost peaceful. The beehive huts, made of stacked stone and driftwood, were empty. The fires were out.

She didn't enter the village. She crouched by the path marker and sifted through the dirt, then plucked an object from it: a bone pin shaped like a tiny fish, carved with skill and exquisite detail, its eyes two chips of amber. She cleaned the grime off it and held it to the light.

"It's beautiful," Luca said. "Something of yours?"

Sirin shook her head, bending to bury it again.

"Don't you want to keep it?"

No. It doesn't belong to me.

She straightened and turned from the village. There was nothing here, nothing for her. She lifted her gaze toward the lower of the twin crags, then turned from the village, leaving it once more to the mist.

"Up there?" Luca asked her, quietly.

Sirin nodded, her hands in fists at her sides.

This climb was easier, though each step tightened her breathing, sharpened the spike of her heartbeat. Luca must have sensed it; he slipped his hand over her wrist, his fingers light on her pulse. He said nothing as they ascended, mounting the steps, the world becoming jagged black shale around them, the crags sharp as broken glass.

Sirin knew this walk. She'd made it many times, her arms full of driftwood, or baskets of sisi, or fresh razor grass harvested from the beach. She'd made it with her grandmother before, helping her when she was very young, and then simply keeping her company when she grew old enough to climb on her own.

Nothing to be afraid of, she'd said, the first time she brought Sirin to the cave. She had been three or four, shivering at the thought of this place. The holiness had terrified her. So had the prophet's skull within with its strange whaleglass tongue, its whispers calling her. They had given her such strange dreams.

Witch dreams, her grandmother explained. Like your witch blood. The Leviathan knows you, Sirin, deep in its own dreams. Some say all the world is its dream.

Ghosts live up there, Sirin had said.

And the ghosts know you, too. Your mother is there. My mother with her. All of our beloved dead. You come to remember them. They know that.

Sirin pressed her eyes shut as she crested the steps, holding back tears.

Do they know me, now?

Do they remember me?

Is there more waiting for me than the dead?

Whispers, whispers. Her grandmother's voice in her head, as real as her own thoughts. She had to do this, this last thing. For her lost people, for this place that had not feared the sight of a slaver ship, that had known nothing of the world beyond its kind seas. Valeria had left the battleground; she had left the world behind, in her grief, in the failing of her faith. Now Sirin walked with her own grief, as she had for so long. She didn't know if she could leave it in the dirt, didn't know if she could walk away from it and find what lay beyond. But Sirin's grandmother had been right, and she trusted her now, as she had then, all those years ago.

Don't be afraid, she said. Her voice faded; it quieted. Luca's voice replaced it. "Sirin," he said, soft and reverent.

She opened her eyes.

It rose from the mist.

The crag, like a ship's prow. The cave below, a rough gash in the mountainside. The stone graves, like silent children in the mist.

The wind lifted, ruffling Sirin's hair. A piercing pain coursed through her, white-hot as lightning.

A trace of yellow fluttered in the wind- yellow sisi flowers.

Sirin drew in. Her limbs were numb; her pulse felt far away, far from her body. The wind fell as she climbed through the stone graves, as she knelt before the cave mouth, as she shivered there in its draught.

A grave-doll stood in the broken shale. The sisi flowers had been woven into a little wreath about its neck, not yet torn away by the wind. It was driftwood dried to a silvery sheen, its eyes carved of shell.

Sirin's breath hissed from her. She reached for the grave-doll. Her fingers brushed its driftwood cheek.

How long had it been there? Not long. Whoever had placed it here must have done so before the last of the sisi flowers died, before the end of summer. They had come here. They had carved this doll, weaved that wreath, had placed it on this holy ground.

It was not for the dead this time, but for a fellow lost child of Alkona like her, for the living. For a ghost that might find a way home.

Sirin felt herself shaking. Her heartbeat trembled in her fingertips. She couldn't hold it back any longer. The sob tore its way from her, and she collapsed to her palms, her spine bent, her forehead pressed to the shale. She sobbed there, facing the dirt; she let the tears come. She let them scour her, so many long years of them.

Luca knelt by her and touched her shoulder. She pulled him to her, her arms around his neck, her face pressed to the curve of his neck and shoulder. He was warm, steady and calm, and he didn't let her go, not for a long time. Not until the tears were done and she was empty, able to breathe, able at last to stand again.

***

Later, they lay curled together in the darkness of the Hornet's small single cabin. A single lantern burned, swaying with the movement of the waves. It cast soft amber light over Luca, limning his bare shoulder and chest, the mess of razor scars carving their way through his skin. Propped on an elbow, looking down at him, Sirin traced them. She traced the line of his arm, the curve of his wrist. Each finger, one by one.

He watched her, his gray eyes glinting under his lashes.

Sirin lifted her hands. What?

"It's good to be here, that's all. Good to be with you."

Beautiful fool.

"Even the nose?"

She ran her thumb down its crooked bridge. Especially that. Like I told you, Valere. It makes your face more interesting.

"How could I forget." He paused, shifting on the bunk. With an exaggerated sense of ease he folded an arm behind his head. His untidy hair spilled into the lamplight, golden waves glistening. "I do hope it might be something you'd be willing to look at most every day."

Meaning?

"I don't know what's going to happen, to me, to Lapide. I can't...I can't claim I'll get it right. But I do know we have a chance, you and I."

Are you a prophet now, making promises of the future?

"Only one." He paused, his smile fading. "That I love you. That I always will. Not much of a vow, I know. But I've heard worse."

Sirin had, too. Once, she knew, that vow might have placed a crown on her head, might have made her queen of the country she'd once been victim to, and which had been her victim in turn. She remembered her dream of herself beneath the cedars, Luca at her side, watching their children play in the sunlight. To be queen of Lapide, the witchborn queen, dressed in blue.

It was only ever a dream. That was not what she wanted, and not what Luca wanted, either. He knew that as well as she did.

She turned her head to the side, considering. Promise me a ship of gold.

"I can...paint one gold."

She let out a silent laugh. That's it?

"It's in your favor, Sirin. Gold is far too dense a metal to make a decent ship. All you'd be sailing is the seabed."

I made a promise too, once, to you. She touched his hair, letting it spill through her fingers. Do you remember?

"Yes."

I promised I would be the one to kill you. I promised I would see your blood on my hands, before the end.

"And?"

And?

"Will you swear to see your promise through as well as I have?"

Close your eyes.

He did. Sirin watched him, watched the lanternlight play over his face. She listened to the gentle rhythm of his breathing.

She pressed her fingertips to his throat.

A wisp of shadow unfurled against Luca's skin. His pulse spiked, but he didn't move. Sirin let her fingers fall, and replaced them with her lips. She kissed the side of his throat, softly, then his cheek. His lashes brushed her face as he opened his eyes again.

Maybe, Sirin signed.

"Maybe what?"

Lapide can never be my home. Not truly. But I love you, Valere. And my answer, to you, is maybe.

Luca nodded, then shrugged. "I've faced worse odds."

We both have.

"And here we are."

Unlikely. Yet I cannot complain.

"Can't you?"

She bent, and kissed him. It is good to be here with you, too.

A hint of Luca's smile returned as he brushed a curl from her face. "It's a fine enough place to begin."

Sirin stayed with him until he fell asleep, then wrapped herself in a blanket and slipped up the ladder to the deck.

Alkona was a great dark crag cut out against the stars, a vast looming presence like a sleeping creature. The clouds drifted, dense and heavy, the tang of approaching rain sharp on Sirin's tongue. She crossed to the bow and leaned against the railing, watching the play of the running lamps over the waves, turning their peaks clear and green.  

She set her eyes on the horizon.

A spark rose in her, wild and strange. It arced through her cold as the wind, a desire so vast it was close to sorrow. The first raindrop touched her cheek. She barely felt it. The rain spoke softly against the deck. It wreathed Alkona in haze, a specter glimpsed through mist.

She spread her arms and let her shadows unfurl, reaching to douse the running lights, reaching to the waves, to the fathoms below, upwards toward the stars and the empty night between them, to the line where the stars met the sea and were drowned in it. She willed it with all of her power, so hard it hurt. A glimpse, a sign.

Come back, Sirin urged. Come back to us.

The horizon remained dark. No flare of blue, no swell of light.

Sirin let out her breath, settling her hands on the icy gunwale. Her shadows released, chasing back to their right place. The stars shone past the clouds. The rain quieted to a whisper on the surface of the sea. She wouldn't see it tonight. Maybe she would never see it again.

It didn't matter. It was out there. The stars turned. The seas rose and fell with the moonset. As the world lived and died, so would the whale that swam it into being, whose life and death meant it would go on turning.

It was here, too, a part of her as much as she was a part of it. It was with Luca, by whose side she would soon go and sit, so he might not be alone when he woke up. It was with her power, the cycle of it unceasing. It was with her, she who had not abandoned herself, who against all odds had come back.

Sirin had walked one path for so long, sure it would end in dust, a lonely death in a lonely place. Now that surety was gone, and the sea spread before her. The world to come was full of pain, perhaps, but full of mercy, too. Both were infinite, in the great and terrible balance of all things.

Whatever came, only one truth was certain.

The Great Leviathan would return.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 50- Luca

***

The streets of Valeris smelled of saltpeter, firework smoke hazy on the wind. Luca breathed it in, savoring the familiar scent, but it wasn't the same as before. A part of him would always think of spellfire.

Afternoon drew a shimmering veil of muggy heat over the city, whitebrick struck blinding under a full, golden sun. Selva, the winter star, was already visible in the sky, a point of silver-blue supplanting Arva's glow. The end of summer had come again, and Nagidanze too, the dance of the serpent, the beast defeated for another year longer. Valeris needed no excuse for celebration, and even in the ruins lamplight shone, bursts of color and song and laughter, agoras alive with festival dances and the sweet scent of spiced dough and sugared fruit.

A serpent firework spun past, trailing a comet of crimson sparks. Children chased after it, festooned in flowers, heedless of the crowds.

Luca moved through the familiar streets, watching the festivities, the flowers, the paper streamers fluttering from doorways and spires. Life pulsed through Valeris like blood through a body. The canals were thick with water traffic, the harbors full again. Still, he knew the city grieved. He saw it in the looks between the smiles, the moments when eyes fell on ruined walls, or buildings hollowed out by monster waves, and the grief returned as bright and clear as ever.

He passed a chapel, its doors flung wide, and glimpsed the statue of the Triune within, wreathed in smoke and candlelight, feet covered with offerings to honor the lost. A courtyard enclosed a snowbloom tree, its branches hung with strips of paper, written with the names of the dead. An old woman knelt at its roots, her eyes closed in prayer.

Valeris mourned- its dead, its queen. What had ended for it, and for Lapide beyond. When Niive had asked Luca about his dour look, he'd done his best to explain. She'd closed the small book she'd been working a translation into, looked up from the open Aiatar tome before her, and pinned him with her golden stare.

"It's a good thing, to be mourned," she said. "It means you were loved."

Their work was endless. Carts of Aiatar books, brought up from the sunken library, seemed to replenish overnight. Translations came slow- Niive's patchwork understanding and Cereza's scraps of dreams of memories made for days full of fits and starts. The Aiatar of Twice-Sunken Rashavir, Tuija and the young witches she'd banded together, had vanished traceless into the oceans. Luca didn't blame them, nor Tuija. She had built them a new world, and for that she deserved her measure of solitude.

Still, Luca had more than once thought, gripping a fistful of his own hair and staring at a line of incomprehensible text, she might have posted me a basic bloody dictionary.

It was no matter. Sleepless nights, hazy days, hours upon hours of poring through book after book bound in sarkyvor hide or agate or studded in pearls big as elks' eyes, scholars shaking him awake after he'd dozed off in his tea, Niive kicking his ankles when he'd read the same line of witch-speak for the twentieth time- all was worth it. Breakthroughs came, cobbled-together texts at once flaring into meaning, and the wonder came flooding back as strong as ever.

There was plenty of room for books, besides, and Academy scholars to assist in the translations. The Palace halls felt empty and echoing these days, hollow as the inside of a shell. The flotsam and frippery of monarchy, the gilt and Ishvoli carpets and detritus of the Valere rule, built and maintained on bloodshed and poison and lies, was slowly being sold off.

His chancellors grumbled, of course.

"The people must heed something," Lady Maryen railed during one council meeting, cracking her fist down into the arm of her chair. She'd inherited the position from her father, executed under Isabella's command. "Otherwise how will they know you from their own?"

"If it's beauty makes for eligibility, Maryen," Luca replied, "I more than suffice."

They couldn't object for long. It was as much a necessary decision as a symbolic one. The royal treasury was depleted thanks to ten years of war, and more building materials, more supplies, more medicines and those to administer them, were needed every day. Whitebrick and steel, grayamber and linen. Tea and nails and clay and flour. Gold wasn't spun from sea salt, as much as Luca willed it so. Few treasures remained. Luca saw two of them every day, each time he climbed from the hidden library excavation with another cartful of Aiatar books.

One was Valeria's sword. The other was the ancestral harpoon, rusty and battered and glinting with godsblood, just a trace, clinging to its point.

Luca always paused by the harpoon, as he had countless times before. Now, though, he knew what it felt like to heft. He knew the smooth slip of his fingers over the divots on its shaft, the weight of it, the way the point gleamed when it caught the Leviathan's light.

He would slip sometimes into mourning what was gone, into a longing grief, making him stare into shadows and empty corners. He let himself, then shook it free and set about his work again. The architects of that way of life were burned and buried. The past was dead, but he could learn from it. He could build something new from the rubble it left behind.

***

Now, Cereza twined her arm through his. She'd come that morning on a spice dhow, her hair braided in Estaran fashion. Luca hadn't realized how much he'd missed her while she was gone, a held breath released at last.

Azare had come with her, and would leave with her, too. Down at the docks, after Cereza had embraced him, he lifted his head to the morning crowds and saw him. Hooded and out of uniform, he was little more than another traveler, one of many that had of late come to Valeris to work or to trade or to marvel at the city that had weathered the onslaught of a god.

Azare was a calm figure in the crowd, straight-backed and still. His dark eyes had found Luca's, and he'd nodded.

Luca had bowed his head in turn. Whatever else the Witchhunter was, he'd come back for Luca, and for Sirin, too. Luca would never forget that.

Cereza would be gone again soon enough; for how long, neither one had any idea. But she was here now, and Luca intended to make the most of it.

"How is darling Alois?" he asked her.

"He sends his undying affection."

"Sweet as that sounds, I doubt he used the word undying. Nor affection, for that matter."

"Oh, fine. He hopes you're well, intends to visit as soon as he can, dull niceties such as those. He's not exactly a poet. But I can tell he wants to see Valeris."

"And what do you think?"

"It looks good."

"It does." They had passed from the main thoroughfare, a street bordering the Vie, and crossed under a newly-built archway into the ruined district itself. "It's hard to see it from within, but each day something new is made, some lingering pain laid to rest."

The monster wave had washed its way through here, sweeping aside all in its path. Buildings stood broken, entire walls sloughed away, the streets still piled with rubble. Scaffolds covered the streets like scabs on a wound, winches creaking, carts of fresh whitebrick standing at the ready. Luca had joined in the first efforts to clear the streets, the work merciless, backbreaking, each day pierced with new grief. A body recovered. Sometimes more than one.

Those days were the worst, to kneel in silence under the noon sun, to hang his head and feel the weight of futile despair settle over his shoulders. There was no slinging it off. There was only letting the despair run its course.

Other days the work was merely frustrations to be overcome. A wall collapsing, unable to stand once the surrounding rubble was taken away. A sinkhole shuddering open, green canal water thick with fish making its own impromptu well. Some streets had to be rerouted, new canals dug; the devastation in the way was too much to shift.

The changes were made when they had to be made. It was necessary, Luca thought, in times like these.

The festival atmosphere had reached the district nevertheless. They passed through a crowded market square, food stalls billowing with fragrant smoke. A statue stood headless, one of the Valere kings, his plinth crumbling away while brushfowl pecked at the loose stones.

Luca paused, looking up at the headless king.

"Who is he, do you suppose?" Cereza said, turning her head to the side and squinting.

"Hard to say. Looks like the gulls have made him theirs."

"Isabella would have known."

"Isabella would have pretended to know." He smiled, but he felt it crack a little. "She would have loved to see the city coming alive again like this."

"She would have done it with that nasty little frown she liked so much." She demonstrated. "Like this."

Luca couldn't help but laugh. "Triune, that's uncanny."

Cereza dipped a dramatic curtsy. "I like this fellow, whoever he is. It takes real nerve to go about without a head." She nudged Luca with her elbow. "Maybe you should have a statue."

"I don't think so, Cee. I'm hardly the kingly sort."

"Not even King Gull?"

"Now that I like."

"King Gull-Brain."

He tweaked her braid. "And you, dearest Cee, shall be queen."

They dawdled in the square, tasting a honey-seller's combs, admiring the cones of spices heaped improbably high and live blue lobsters huge as children, swimming in seawater, a delicacy for summer's end. Cereza begged for a garland of sweet blossoms from the flowering tree she'd been named for, pale pink and shimmering with pollen. Luca, ultimately, obliged.

The girl at the booth waved away his coins.

"My pa's a docksman, m'lord," she said. "Would have been drowned had you not ordered the floodgates open." She gripped his hand between hers, her face flushed and eyes bright. "I'm grateful. Truly, sir. More than I can say."

That time, his smile felt real.

"You see?" Cereza said as they left the square, heading canalside toward the docks district beyond. "Don't be glum, Luca. Not today."

"Glum? You're sure those flowers aren't poisoning your eyes?"

She tightened her grip on his arm, and he did the same. He knew what his sister meant. Who she meant.

Sirin should be there. She should have walked by his side, garlanded in flowers. She should have seen Valeris heal, the city she'd striven to save.

Grief twisted through him, and foolish hope, a splinter driven deep in Luca's heart. He made himself breathe until it faded, but the hope remained.

It always would.

Light spilled from a bell-shaped paper lantern hanging over a cantina door. Music twined through the doorway- bad music, to Luca's ear- and he gave Cereza a look with raised eyebrows as they passed the salt grannies smoking in the doorway, ducking into the close, steamy interior. Amber light pooled over tables, and the air was dense with the mingled scents of spirit and sweat, the clack of dice and snarled curses, the clashing conversations.

Over all, the music twanged, played with admirable abandon on a lute. Luca peered over the crowd and made out the source: Matteo, clever Matteo, kicked back on a broad windowsill with one heel braced on the back of a chair, working his way through a song:

When you're hungry for dinner, Ishvol's smelt pass the test,

And a Buyani sturgeon will do for the rest,

Noga'i lobefish, herring galore,

But don't tell me, sweet lovelies, you wouldn't crave more!

For a night sweet and sultry, Lapidaean is fine-

A trout silver-scaled is wholly divine,

In butter, in sapsilk, spiced or undressed,

The most vicious of fishes, but surely the best!

In the corner, in a flutter of fans and froths of golden lace, reclined Irene, nearly unrecognizable. Great panniered skirts creaked with each wave of the fan, upholstered in yards upon yards of violent pink sapsilk, pocked with pearls and tasseled like a footstool. Her hair was piled on her head, locs secured with jeweled ornaments. Her face was painted, her lashes kohled, brightening the pale gleam of her whaleglass eye.

Atana sat at her side in far less splendor. She looked up at Luca and Cereza's approach, her eyes springing wide as she saw them coming.

"Atana!" Cereza rushed toward her, and the two girls embraced, immediately launching into furious conversation.

"Valere," Irene drawled. She swept a hand over her table. "Sit, the both of you."

"A cherry on top and you're ready for the bakery window." Luca claimed a stool. "Enjoying your wealth, Irene?"

"It becomes me." She snapped her fan shut and smiled luxuriantly. "My reaving days are past me, Valere. Time for me to loll and languish into glorious obscurity."

"As much as I don't believe that, congratulations." He threw a glance at Matteo. "I see you still can't afford music lessons."

"I think he's gotten almost tolerable." Irene flicked her fan at him. "While you look worse than ever. Is the crown so heavy as that?"

"I don't have a crown. I'm not a king."

Irene snorted. "Not a bloody king?"

"One of Isabella's last orders was to strip me of my titles and my claim," he said. "I didn't think it right to revoke it so soon."

He thought of Valeria's tomb. He remembered the ruins of sunken Rashavir, the rushing waves, the emptiness. Gone, and gone forever.

"The days of Valere kings and queens are over," he said. "Whatever Lapide is now, it must be governed differently. It'll take time to work out what that means, but for now, I'll do what I can without a crown."

"Shame," Atana said. "A crown would suit you."

He winked at her. "No need to gild perfection."

"And the witchborn?" Irene leaned her head back against the wall, watching him with that motley stare. "You heard from her?"

Luca turned his eyes from her and toward the window overlooking the street. Gulls circled above; the sky was a rich blue, afternoon melting into evening. Another sunset was coming, another day's end. One after the next. Would he wait for her forever?

Some nights he dreamed of dead cities, of a glory of stars, of the Great Leviathan's light filling the sky, and the sea, and him, until he didn't know where he ended and the Leviathan began. Signs and visions. He woke with his eyes streaming tears, his heart hammering in his chest. He believed she was there until he grasped the far side of the bed and found it cold. The shadows were empty. They weren't hers anymore.

He shook his head.

"It's good to see you," Cereza said, after a long pause. "You're welcome here, both of you. We owe you so much."

"The debt was paid," Atana said. "That's our way. And we'll keep it our way." She squeezed Cereza's hands, their fingers interlaced. "I have something for you."

She withdrew her hands and reached into her cloak pocket, then set the small bundle on the table. Carefully, she picked open the fabric. Sunlight caught the whaleglass and flared it to brilliance; colors danced across the walls, as if cast through a prism. Luca caught the glitter of stars suspended in the crystal, and felt a shift inside him, old wonder not yet buried.

The Belmont cup. Cereza breathed a soft oh, reaching to run her fingertips over its rim. Atana pushed the cup toward her.

"It's yours," she said. "Always was."

"You don't need it?" Luca asked.

She shook her head. "Just take it, Valere."

Cereza's hands closed over the cup, gathering it to her heart. It wouldn't heal all the lingering wounds of the world. Still, Luca reasoned, better there was now one less.

***

Evening came, dusk drawing its shadows over Valeris. Luca and Cereza at last left Atana and Matteo, Irene and Nadya, who had been drinking with a group of Buyani sailors in a herring-house down the street. Together they began the long, long climb up the mountainside, toward the pair of whitebrick markers at clifftop, toward the pyre.

The setting sun turned the wind to flames, the cliff grass flashing green to gold and green again. Luca made out the trace of the moons overhead- a pale disc and a ghostly crescent, the last moon not yet risen. Valeris sprawled below, simmering and aglitter. The sunset lit the Vie like a fuse, turning the whole canal to a ribbon of brilliant orange. By the time he and Cereza reached the twin markers, the first of the stars had come out, a faint spangle at the edge of the horizon.

"It's so beautiful here," Cereza said. She held her hair back with both hands, long tatters of gold escaping her braids.

"Best view in Valeris. You can see Estara if you squint."

"What?" She narrowed her eyes toward the horizon, then blinked, and slapped Luca on the arm. "Liar."

"You actually looked!"

"Shut up."

A shadow fell over them. Niive circled ahead, lower and lower. At last she alit with little more than a rustle atop one of the ancient walls clinging to the cliff, structures long-since crumbled into ruins. Cereza went to her, and folded into her arms.

"Missed you," she murmured.

Niive kissed the top of her head. "It's been entire hours."

"Intolerable."

"How were the pirates? Dead or devastated?"

"They're not going to make you swear to service again, you know."

Niive let out a low growl. "I can never be too careful."

The grass whispered around them as they made the journey to the pyre. It was sun-warm, its stones seamed with cracks, worn down by generations of wind and sun and driving rain. Cereza set down her basket, and together she and Luca and Niive built a small shrine at the pyre's base.

Incense, first, and candles. Cedar branches next, woven into a fragrant wreath, leaving a rime of sap on their fingertips. A sailor's charm came after, and a crab claw, and an ammonite stone, its perfect spiral imprinted by time into its surface. Niive slid one of her long black feathers into the wreath, her head bowed, her golden eyes unreadable.

What did she pray for? She'd only mock him if he asked. Besides, some things were best left unsaid.

The shrine was finished. Luca lit the candles, and the three of them stood back, watching the flames dance in the breeze.

"Isabella would be honored," Cereza said.

"I'd give all the honor in the world for her to be here now."

"She wouldn't have had it any other way. You know that."

"I do." Luca smiled. The bittersweet scent of incense filled the wind. "She loved us. And Lapide. I wish she could have seen the end of the war. I wish she could have seen peace again."

Cereza shrugged, her brow furrowed. "Well, if it's true," she said, slowly, "and all things are one, maybe in some way she does."

They drew together, the three of them, knocking shoulders. Niive lifted her wings, shielding them from the worst of the wind. Up here, the world was one of chasing clouds and gull-cries, nothing between them and the endless sky. The sun sank into the sea, and lit it on fire. The color of the waves far below shifted with the currents- one moment a blue to match the sky, the next a deep, pensive green, gulls drifting on the swells.

Luca lifted his face to the wind, breathing deep the taste of salt, of the coming night, complicated and strange. The sun would sink; the moons would rise. The tide would rise with it, a breath in and out. Longing rose in him, harsh and sweet- for what, he couldn't name. To see it, maybe. To see the first flare of blue, and know the Leviathan was there.

But he'd always known. He loved it in its many forms, loved that it had made this world, loved that the grand fractal of its making had miraculously conspired to bring him to this place, this time, to these people he loved so much. It had made him who he was. It had allowed in him the capacity for that love.

To love the Great Leviathan was to love the world, in all its infinite terror and wonder. To love it was to have faith in that world, that it could be made again, and made better. That against all odds it could go on.

The wind shifted. He heard Cereza's gasp behind him. "Luca," she breathed, tugging at his elbow.

He turned.

A silhouette stood in the grass, some distance away.

Luca's breathing stilled. He heard the pulse of his heart in his head. No, he thought, because it was impossible, because she would vanish with the sunset, because she was some trick of the light. But she did not vanish, and he found himself moving toward her, parting the grass with each stride.

Wind raced and hissed over the clifftop. The grass rippled in its wake, green to gold to green again.

Sirin's hair had grown. It was ruffled about her shoulders in loose black curls. She wore traveling clothes, faded mantle and salt-spattered jerkin, a hooked knife at her belt, new hollows under her eyes. Those eyes were the same as ever, tilted and dark, bright and vivid, watching Luca as he drew near.

He stopped an arm's length off. He heard her faint exhale, made out the crease between her brows, the stillness of her, at once tense and tentative.

Luca found his voice.

"Sirin?" he said.

She smiled- a little at first, then widening, then full, and glorious. He crossed the distance between them in a rush, already reaching out, gathering her into his hands, gathering her to him. His hands found her face; hers found his wrists, his shoulders.

Then, it was as if the last barrier between them shattered, and she was there. All of her. Her needle breaths, her bright eyes. The weight of her, real and solid. She threw her arms around his neck, fingers curling deep into his shirt as she buried her face in the curve of his shoulder.

He pulled her in, and then it was not silence but the pounding of his heart, living because of her, beating because of her.

His breath caught in his throat, each inhale jagged, a laugh and a sob.

"Sirin," he said. "Triune, Sirin-"

He pulled back to get a good look at her. Her face was gaunter, a new scar nicking her jawline, but she was still Sirin, every line, every trace. He drank her in, trembling between outrage and relief so pure it hurt.

"Where in all Hells have you been?" he managed.

Far away.

"Why?"

Her brows creased again. I could not. I could not...follow you. Not then. What I did, what I dreamed-

She looked down at Valeris below. She didn't sign again for a long time.

I was not right for this, she said at last. For you.

Luca touched her cheek, and her eyes flicked to him. "So why did you come back?" he asked her, gently.

I- wanted to- help. Build. She paused. I am strong. I can help with what is needed.

He let out a relieved laugh. "I think that can be arranged."

And I came because I am ready. To begin again. To begin something new.

Luca nodded. Something new. "Well...I'd like to show you Valeris, to start," he said. "Show you properly, I mean. See it with you."

A hint of a smile touched her lips.

Then show me, Valere.

Luca held out his hand, and Sirin's, at last, was there to take it.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 49- Alois

***

"Your Majesty?"

The voice cracked on the end of the word. Alois heard a cough. "Er, I'm...really sorry- King Alois?"

Alois turned. The Tower guard swept into a bow, fist clasped to her heart. She looked young, no older than sixteen- one of the newer guards, he recognized. After Enzo Acier's massacre, few of the old guard had been left alive. Lapin had command of them, and even under the pall of smoke lingering from Acier's destruction, she'd filled out the ranks once more. All three isles of Estara had come forth at her entreat, and at Alois's; he was not the only one to want Estara rebuilt.

The guard's round face was flushed, her dark, curly hair secured under her billed helmet. She was from Ibaris, judging from her accent.

"Forgive me for the disturbance," she stuttered, "but you have a visitor."

"No disturbance." Alois smiled, forcing himself to not touch his newly-stubbled chin. It looks fine. Don't draw attention to it. "I was only admiring the workmanship. It's beautiful, really. I feel I never noticed it before."

He stood in the great King's Hall, the vault of dark stone and rust marble at the heart of Pavaloir Tower. Now, it was silent, echoing, empty. Some work had been done that morning on the masonry, and a low scaffold stood in a corner, drop-cloths hung like companionable ghosts. A broom leaned against a pillar, a small pile of detritus waiting to be cleared away. The hall's ornate chandeliers were ordinarily lit, their candles so distant they drifted, hazy in the gloom, like shoals of stars. Now they were dark; the high narrow windows at the far end of the hall stood open, allowing shafts of dusty late-summer sunlight, dense and golden.

The sunlight touched the half-reassembled carvings of Ardain's conquest, scenes of battle carved deep into panels of volcanic rock, set in steel and towering twice Alois's height so the figures stood life-size, wide eyes and snarling faces rendered in vivid detail. The centuries had robbed them of none of their power. It had taken Enzo Acier to do that.

Now, the dark stone was a network of cracks and splits, webbed with patches of rougher rock where pieces had crumbled too small to restore. The entire relief had the look of a tomb mosaic after centuries of water had wept it away, figures missing heads and hands and weapons. Tools waited on workbenches; trays of rubble stood as of yet unsorted. The masons and artisans Alois had called from far over the sister isles had done fine work, but it would never be the same.

Nor should it be, Alois thought. So much of the past had been forgotten, or buried. It wasn't always kind, but it had to be remembered, even if only so it wasn't repeated.

"Very nice," the guard said, after a pause.

"Go on. Speak your mind."

"They're...a bit loud, is all," she said. "I wouldn't want them in the barracks, if you catch my meaning."

Alois laughed. "Unfortunately, I don't always get to choose the decor, not where royal treasures are concerned." He nodded toward the hall doorway. "Go on. I've gazed enough. I shouldn't keep my visitor waiting."

The guard bowed and retreated, her shoulders stiff in her gray uniform, her hands at her sides.  Alois turned back to the panel. As a boy, Alois had walked the panels with mingled fear and awe. This is what it means to be king, he'd thought, pausing at the final triumphal panel of Ardain and his traitorous brother, the former poised to behead, the latter kneeling at Ardain's feet. He was a true son of Estara.

Now, standing at Ardain's feet, examining the long-dead king's hard, square face and furrowed brow, Alois wondered if the panels had been made for other reasons. If the king's victory, which, after all, had led to his death at the jaws of a sea-ork, had been no victory at all.

He supposed he'd never know. The sculptor had left no indication one way or the other, and folk saw what they wanted.

So could he. The panels would remain in their fractured form, and he would learn from them. Maybe all of Estara could, too. A legacy was a heavy thing to carry, but it could be a comforting weight, even as it crushed him. Alois knew how difficult it was to let go.

Quick footsteps rang against the marble floor; too fast for Alois to turn arms hooked over his shoulders and spun him down into a fast hug. He glimpsed a flash of golden hair before his face was in it, crushed deep into her sweet-scented curls.

"Cereza," he managed.

"Hmm?"

"Can't breathe."

"Oh!" She loosened her grip, her face glowing in the sunlight, her eyes bright. She wore breeches, a salt-spattered cloak, her hair in tangled braids, a vast bulging basket slung over her shoulder. She was smiling, a vast infectious grin that seized Alois in its grip. He grinned in return; he couldn't help it, not with her.

"Now, that wouldn't do," she went on. "Less than an hour in Pavaloir and already committing regicide."

A guard by the door coughed.

"Only joking," Cereza called.

"How was your journey over the Arm?" Alois asked.

"Full of late nights and smoked fish and endless epics sung to the moons. Noga'i tradesmen have singularly beautiful singing voices, did you know?"

"I confess I did not. Perhaps I'll invite a trio to perform here this midwinter."

"Them and their smoked fish?"

"We must have something to eat, mustn't we?" He clasped her hands. "I really should have sent a ship for you, it wouldn't have been any trouble, I know you don't like that sort of thing, but-"

"Do shut up." Cereza turned to stand alongside him, studying the panel of Ardain as Alois had just been studying it. "Dour fellow."

"I always thought he looked like Daval," Alois said. "It's the nose. And the expression. I saw that look in his eye more times than I can count."

A piece of Ardain's face was loose; Alois reached out to push it back into place, but it came away in his hand. He fiddled with it, then pushed it into his pocket, where it weighed heavy and cold.

"You won't be like him," Cereza said quietly.

"I know I won't. But Estara loved him. For all his crimes, he had their hearts, and his people would have followed him to the end. What if they-"

He stopped. His throat was thick.

"Expect him?" Cereza supplied. "Want him?"

"I can't be like him," Alois said. "I won't be."

"I'm here," Cereza said. "Aren't I? I can be here with you. Once I would have said that was impossible."

She smiled again, small and almost tentative. "And we've all seen the impossible too many times to count."

A bell began to ring from beyond the Tower walls, slow and rich. Its bronze voice filled the King's Hall with its somber echo. The Cathedral bell, etched with Bellana's lightning, calling out across Pavaloir. Calling the mercy of the Sky-Queen upon Korun Vazar. The night came at the dying of the summer, when the relentless heat at last begun to chill, when Bellana's mercy grew thin. Korun Vazar. In liturgical Estaran, literally Night of King's Blood. It was a night for ceremony, a time for king's blood to be spilled in seawater as symbolic sacrifice.

Long ago, according to a ghastly book Alois had unearthed in the Tower archives, rimed with dust and much-clotted with mothnests, Korun Vazar had been marked by real sacrifices, slaves' throats slit over crashing waves to feed the new year and the new reign in turn. Now, the king paid the price, though Alois supposed a little blood was a better one than most.

"Are you ready for tonight?" Cereza asked him, reading his expression as the voice of the bell rang on.

Alois gave an unsteady little laugh. "Oh, of course. Nothing more than the renewal of Estara's prosperity on my shoulders. I'll be to blame, you know, if the priests of Bellana don't see favorable omens in the upcoming year..."

"It'll be fine," Cereza said.

"If I miss the basin-"

"I'll make hawk noises."

"Oh, that'll be subtle."

"It's not meant to be. Everyone will be looking at me making a fool of myself instead of at you bleeding everywhere you're not meant to." She paused, then blinked. "Oh! I nearly forgot. I have something for you."

She thrust her arm into her traveling-basket and rummaged. "Well, I brought you these as well-" She shook a little velvet box. "Honey sweets from Cavrae, they're divine, I had one, I hope you don't mind- ah, here it is."

Cereza emerged with a book. It was bound in blue, corners silvered. She held it out.

Alois took it. Cereza chewed her lip as he smoothed his palm over the cover, then opened it. The pages fanned open, covered not in geometric Estaran writing, but in raised lines and point-marks.

"It's writing," Cereza burst out before Alois could speak. "I had the bookbinder hammer them into the vellum. Like a smith hammering copper...it's the book of the Saints, I know you're not exactly a pious sort, but...you know, it's traditional, and I'm fairly certain you haven't already got a copy like this. See?"

She tapped the page with a nail. "You can read it by touch. I know your medicine is helping, but this will never fail you."

Alois's fingers found the ridges. His brow creased. His lips fluttered, tracing the words in their antique, liturgical Estaran, formal and precise.

"You had this made for me?" he asked.

"There wasn't a copy like this in Valeris. Do you...is it all right?"

He closed the book, gently, and clasped it to his chest. "There's a passage from the Book of Beasts, the song of the wanderer Aziliz," he told her. "It goes something like...and the world was salt, and unfathomable depths, and the moons themselves had hidden their faces behind the night. But she sailed on, for she knew who she had waiting for her. Their love was a world to her that even these deserts of night could not darken."

He stopped, and looked at her as she watched him. "That's you, for me. That's what you'll always be. I'll treasure this book to the last. Like I treasure you."

Her eyes were bright. He held out his arms and she folded into them, head tucked in the hollow of his throat, arms looped loosely around his back.

"Is he with you?" Alois asked quietly.

Cereza lifted her face. "Yes."

"Walk with me?"

"Always."

Ziva Lapin waited just beyond the door, one shoulder braced against the wall. She wore Witchhunter grays, the slash of scarlet sapsilk across her chest bright as blood even in the shadows. She straightened as Cereza and Alois approached.

"Need me, sir?" she asked.

"I'll be gone a moment. Make excuses for me, will you?"

"Only the best."

"Lapin-" He paused. She watched him, a slight crease between her brows. She knew already, Alois realized.

"He's here," he said, more quietly. "He'll see you, if you're ready."

She nodded. "I-" she began. "I can't. Not now. But give him my love, won't you?"

"I will," Alois promised her.

"I will go to him. One day."

"He knows."

***

Alois and Cereza left the confines of the King's Hall, trading the dark rock corridors of Pavaloir Tower for the drenching honey sunlight scattered to dancing by the wind, for the open sky. It was beginning to darken to a deep, rich blue at its vaults, cloudless and pure, the sea below like a reflection of its color. Alois filled his lungs on the air; he smelled dust on it, and salt, and the heat of Pavaloir below.

The city stretched before him, hazy through smoke and dust and late-summer heat. Lamplight glittered down the roadways, paths of light so straight Luca might have drawn them with one of his navigator's tools. This all must have seemed strange to Cereza. Lapide's festivals took place during midsummer, during the ascent and descent of Arva, the summer star. Fireworks, frivolity. Dances and masks, carnival barges festooned with ribbons and paper flowers, reels to midnight, whiskey flowing like the waters of the Vie.

By now, at summer's end, they would be drawing to a close. Estaran revels were a different beast altogether- stately, not fanciful, the city red with fellfox banners, with grand displays of battle and might, with duels so formal they looked to Alois like dances, crimson-clad duelists whirling from step to step as spell-steel flashed and flickered between them. Priests led prayers from chapel steps, dozens of the faithful kneeling below, hands lifted as if to catch their holy words. Blade-dances, liturgical songs, a great butchered gholiant roasted in a pit, the flames reaching for the firmament. Bellana liked her meat blackened. The oily dark smoke had lingered in the sky for hours, carrying prayers to the Sky-Queen herself.

The smoke, however holy, held memories as dark as a death-shroud. Yet the burned crater Enzo Acier had blasted into the harbor was nearly obscured by the new growth of buildings, the bay thick with masts, lanterns winking at taberna doorways and market plazas alive with color and constant movement.

A pennant of blue snapped in the harbor: a Lapidaean cog, a trading ship, bringing with it more than cargo. There were reparations to be made, alliances to be forged anew. That it was here at all was miraculous, a delicate tension too easily snapped. He'd welcomed the cog himself, his city guard flanking him in ceremonial uniform, priests of Bellana in attendance- a day of honor and celebration, relief the war had come to an end, a gesture of confidence that the people of Pavaloir wanted this. They wanted days of peace. They wanted a clear horizon. He had to trust them now, as much as they had to trust him.

Past the bay mouth, fishing boats dotted the swells, the late afternoon sunlight painting a molten river over the surface of the sea. As Alois and Cereza emerged onto the sea walk, Alois paused by the plinth of a statue to stare over the pathway of sun-gilt waves, like an arrow, pointing across Bellana's Arm and toward distant Lapide.

Have faith, he urged himself. This will be good.

This will be.

This is.

They descended the long, rocky path to the shoreline. It cut down the cliffside, chiseled out centuries ago so the kings of Pavaloir Tower might have a lonely place to contemplate their faith, to walk as holy men once did in the presence of the sea. Now, it was worn and crumbling, carved handrails smooth under Alois's hands. Far below, he caught sight of the ship: a single lateen-rigged dhow rocking on the waves, nets cast in anticipation of the rock-fish that swam thick over these mussel beds.

Waves boomed against the cliffs, hollow and shuddering, and Alois felt their vibration deep inside him, his grip slick on the rail.

They took a waiting skiff out to the dhow. Cereza wanted to row, but Alois muscled the oars away from her.

"Doesn't seem proper," she groused, but lay back in the stern of the little boat all the same, her wide reed hat trailing from a hand like a girl in a yellow-papered novel.

"All you need is a parasol," Alois said.

"So buy me one. Tasseled sapsilk, if you please."

"So demanding." "Just imagine if you'd married me," Cereza said, and kicked up a slippered foot on the gunwale. "I'd be a thousand times worse than this."

Shouts in Noga'i rang through the wind as the skiff drew nearer, alongside the dhow. Ropes were thrown, hands offered, sailors pulling Cereza and Alois onboard. Cereza launched into immediate conversation with a couple of the sailors, and they showed off the rockfish they'd already caught, great spike-finned things big as an elk calf with goggle eyes shining in the sunlight.

Alois turned from them, his pulse hammering at the base of his throat. Cereza caught his eye and nodded toward the upper deck.

Alois climbed the ladder and stopped. Away from the sailors and Cereza's bright voice, the world fell quiet. The creak of canvas; the sough of wind. The gentle wash of waves against the hull, the seabirds tilting on the breeze. A sailor's charm chimed from the mast, silver and orktooth. Sunlight glittered on the deep green water; it fell, thick as honey, on Alois's skin.

He was waiting there already.

Even after a year, he still wasn't used to the sight of Severin Azare in anything besides Witchhunter grays. He wore linen and leather and a deep green sun-mantle, frayed around the edges. Traveling clothes. He looked like he'd been doing a lot of traveling, looked like he could use some good sleep. He gazed at Pavaloir past the cliffs, at the great city he could no longer walk in, the shores he could no longer stand upon, thanks to the witch's curse.

Alois moved to stand beside him.

"I'll never forget how it looks in the sunlight," Azare said, after a moment. "Like it's cast in amber."

"When did you see it first?"

"Coming here with my father. The general decided I was to become a proper Estaran, and there was no place to make me one but Pavaloir. I was afraid, but I couldn't show it." He paused. "That was that same day I met Daval."

Alois could barely imagine Daval as a child, nor Azare, for that matter. "I doubt he was afraid to meet you."

"Oh, he was," Azare said. "As a boy he more often got lashings for thieving sweets than praise for his propriety."

He smiled a little, the corners of his dark eyes creasing. "It took time to become like he was at the end."

Alois glanced up at him. He felt the weight of the stone in his pocket, the shard of the panel he'd carelessly shoved there. He produced it: a piece of Ardain's face, hawk nose and narrowed eye. Daval's face.

"Do you miss him?" Alois asked, his voice soft.

Azare didn't speak for a moment.

"I could say I hated him," he said, eventually. "I could blame all that was done on him, and him alone. But I had a hand in it. Etain Belmont had a hand in it. And so did his father, and his before him. A long line of kings, each one shaping their nation, each one afraid of what it might become if they failed."

He touched the panel shard, tracing the line of Ardain's profile. "Daval failed. So did I. So did Sofia Valere. We were all of us meant to keep our nations safe, and the people in them free of war, and loss, and pain."

He looked down. "I failed you, Alois. And Estara. Daval, too. That's what I miss. What might have been. What should have been."

Alois's throat was tight, his eyes warm. "Lapin sends her love," he said.

"She has mine. Always."

"So," Alois said, nodding at Azare's traveling clothes, "you've decided, then."

"I have."

"When will you return?"

"That's up to Cereza. She has questions. About herself, about her power. She has a right to find  answers."

"I wish I could go with you."

Azare glanced down at him with a trace of a smile.

Alois shook his head. "I...I don't, really. I just wish...I want..."

He shook his head again, his hands curling into fists on the railing. The shadows of gulls danced across the waves. "I want to help her."

"You have Estara to mind, Majesty. Start there."

"Azare..." His throat clenched as he lifted his eyes to Azare's. They were steady and dark as always, and held Alois's gaze, unblinking.

"You don't have to call me that," Alois said. "You...you don't have to pretend."

The lines at the corners of Azare's eyes tightened.

"Alois," he said, softly, his voice almost lost in the hush of the waves, the cries of seabirds. He reached in a pocket and withdrew a small roll of vellum. "This is for you."

"You found them?"

"I did."

Alois turned the little scroll over in his hands. He felt his pulse in his fingertips, fever-fast. "You're sure?"

"I am."

"All I want is to know they're well. Is that...is that right, do you think?"

"You'd know better than I do. You're the king."

The word sent a pang through Alois, a clutter of nerves and ancient terror. It still felt new to him, raw and strange. He couldn't reconcile the man he saw in the mirror each morning to the reality of what he was. Alois Belmont, beloved of Bellana, king of the three sister isles of Estara. Daval's heir, Pavaloir's sovereign.

He was crowned quickly upon his return to Pavaloir, his council of Estaran lords desiring like him a definite leader to steer the country through the aftermath of Acier's attack. Estara demanded answers- about the war, about Queen Isabella Valere's death. The witchborn that had burned Pavaloir, the plague of ghosts, the Great Leviathan, returned at last. Alois gave them their answers. There would be no secrets anymore, no Bloodmonger's empire. Alois did not know what lay ahead. He only knew his people relied on him, and they had to trust each other.

Maybe it was good to be afraid. Better fear than hate. He'd see the days of imperial conquest left in the past, in the dust where they belonged. For now, Estara, wounded, reeling, rebuilding from the future Daval had dreamed for it, needed the familiarity of a Belmont king. He'd do all he could for it, as long as it still needed him.

And when it didn't?

Well. Maybe it was right the last of Estara's kings would be no true Belmont at all.

He remembered Isabella's face, her smile, the trust she'd placed in him. He wished he could show her. He wished she too could see these times.

But wishes were useless, now. She was gone, but what they'd dreamed together didn't have to be. It was no longer a dream. It was awake in the city beyond.

Alois nodded, then tucked the little scroll in his waistcoat. "I'll miss you."

"And you, Alois. I like the beard, by the way. It suits you."

"You think so?" Alois scraped his palm along his jaw, stubble rasping against his skin. It still felt fresh, like the title of king. Both were things that needed careful grooming before they ended up springing their borders.

"I wish you could have come to the coronation. I wish you could have been there as Witchhunter," Alois went on, quietly. "At my side, like you were for Daval."

"Even if I could have, I'm not Royal Witchhunter anymore. I'm not what Estara needs now. Let my days die with Daval."

"And the truth of what we are to one another?" Alois asked. "Does that have to die too?"

"Does it?"

Alois thought for a long moment, then nodded.

"Estara can't know," he said. "The people need a Belmont, not a bastard. They need a king. A true son of Estara. If I'm to be that for them, I have to be, and remain, Alois Belmont."

"I understand."

"I wish-" He cut off. His heart knocked against his ribs. He stared out to sea.

"Yes?"

He couldn't speak. There was too much he wanted to say. The silence between them was shimmering, as fine as spun glass. So hard-won, this, and Alois felt it as sharply as Azare must too. Such wounds in that silence. Such terrible, unhealed wounds.

But Azare was reaching out. He breached the silence, and the distance. With one hand he clasped Alois's shoulder.

Alois's next breath quivered, a rough sawblade rasp in his throat.

"I'm so proud of you," Azare said. "So proud to call you my king. And more proud than that to call you my son."

Alois gripped his wrist and pulled him in. He felt the spike in Azare's pulse, the moment of resistance, and then his hand slid to the back of Alois's head, holding him lightly, fingers through his curls.

He pressed his face to Azare's warm shoulder and let the tears come. Estara would demand his strength. It would need a stone exterior, austere as one of the statues of dead kings on the parapets high above.

For now it wasn't necessary. For now, he could let himself be loved.

At last he let Azare go, and they drew apart once more. Gulls circled, squabbling overhead, their wheeling shadows tracing circles around them on the deck.

Azare nodded to Pavaloir beyond. "It'll heal," he said. His voice sounded unsteady. "It's strong."

"It's not over, you know. The work."

His father smiled. "It never is."

"There is something you can do for me."

"Oh?"

"It's Korun Vazar. I need to perform the sacrifice when I return to Pavaloir. Will you recite the holy words with me?"

"You know the words, Alois."

"Once again. I want to be ready. I want them to be right."

***

Cereza went with him back to the Tower and stayed with him, as long as she could. The priests came for him nevertheless, came to take him to the grand echoing chambers of the Cathedral, dressed for the day in dust and scarlet; they came to make him holy before Bellana's eyes.

Estaran sunsets were glorious, like none other Alois had seen. On another night he and Cereza might climb the black ramparts of the Tower heights and crouch amidst statues and sun-warmed stone. There they'd drink honey whiskey and belt sea-shanties; they'd watch the sun as it fell into the bath of fire that was the sky. Tonight, the sunset was no lesser, but there would be no honey whiskey, no climbing, no songs. No sea-shanties, anyway. Tonight was one of holy songs.

Now the sunset blazed, painting the sea with a river of flame-orange and molten gold. Alois could just see it through the high slit windows of the chamber, vast and hexagonal, candles guttering in their niches, Saints staring down at them with relics clasped between their hands.

Alois felt like a child as the robed priests stripped him in the center of the chamber. The air was chill, the rust-colored marble of the floor like ice against the soles of his feet. High above the bell rang, and he felt it in his bones like the rhythm of the waves.

They scrubbed him with seawater and with dry red earth. Fellfox banners furled and unfurled above him, black and crimson. Black for the obsidian throne, red for the earth they scrubbed him with. Alois spoke the prayers after the high priest, his body numb with cold. It seemed like they might go on forever, intricate liturgies and pledges, promises and pleas. The vows of a king to his people. I am not holy, Alois thought, and shivered. But he was still king.

At last they were done, and stepped back to allow the next priests forth. Each layer of regalia settled over him, acolytes swinging censers of bitter incense as the priests dressed him. First came sapsilk, cool as springwater, light against his bare, scrubbed skin. Next: a fitted waistcoat of dense velvet, flaring at the hip, falling to his knees. Oversleeves heavy with embroidery, the spears of Bellana's lightning flashing silver in the falling noon light. Incense smoke, candles flickering. A coat of scarlet wool, caped and frogged and worked with crowned fellfoxes; a mantle of black fur, the same Daval had worn at his own coronation more than twenty years past.

He closed his eyes, the bell's vibration settling deep inside him. Long, long rows of silver buttons, fastened one by one. Lastly came the crown. A simple thing, a circlet of volcanic glass. It rested on his curls; he had to keep his head high lest it fall to the flagstones.

The priests retreated, and he stood alone. The tolling of the bell faded, and he heard the crowd beyond the Cathedral. Ziva Lapin waited for him, the Royal Witchhunter beside her king.

"You ready, Majesty?" she asked him.

He let out a shaky breath. "I hope I don't look a fool."

"You? Never."

Alois eyed her. "I can't tell if you're mocking me or not."

"I know." He held her gaze, dark and steady. Twenty years Lapin had stood at Azare's side, and now here she was, at his. She'd trusted him, not by allegiance but by choice, and he found, despite all, he was glad to have her.

When she smiled at him, it was soft. "They're waiting for you," she said, nodding toward the doors, the crowd on the grand steps, straining for the first sight of their king. Cereza was out there. His people were out there, his city, his nation.

The priests stood aside, and Alois took the first step toward the open Cathedral doors, toward the city beyond.

He thought of the tiny roll of vellum, burning in his hand, waiting for him, too.

He moved into the crowd, into the whispers of Majesty, and quelled them with touches, with head bowed, with dusty hands clasped. There was a cleft in the rock, an axe split down and down into Pavaloir's heart, leading to the sunless depths of a sea-cave far below. The basin of burning martyr boughs waited on its cleft above the sea-cave, and echoing from it he heard the boom and shudder of the waves, deep as the heartbeat of the world.

A child acolyte- head shaved, robes dusty- gave him the tiny hooked knife, carved from a claw of obsidian. "Thank you," he whispered to the child, who smiled gingerly up at him, then scurried back under the critical eye of an elder priest.

Alois approached the cleft. A wound in the rock, a black gash, like Sirin's shadows. Salt wind, cold and damp, breathed over him as he lifted the knife, as he slit his palm over the cleft, as his blood unspooled into the darkness.

The cheer was like thunder. Alois flinched, and looked up, the crowds stretching before him, dust-haze and martyr smoke, the endless snap of red banners, all the way to the sunstruck bay. Alois blinked; the smoke stung in his eyes. He glanced back to Lapin; she gave him a nod and a wink. Cereza was there in the crowd, beneath the pavilion of lords, a shimmer of silver. She cheered for him, too, her beautiful face radiant in the sunlight. Dust hung in the air, in every breath, and as Alois lifted his bloodied hand to the eyes of Pavaloir, as the cheer turned to a roar, he remembered Azare's sacrifice. It had not bound him to Estara, but had severed him from it.

He felt again the boom of the waves, the knock of his own pulse against his bones. Old prayers rose in him, old fear. Please let this be right. Please let there be peace.

Please, please, please.

***

Later, Alois retreated from the sunlit splendor of the Cathedral agora and to Pavaloir Tower, to the ministrations of a physician. As the day sank toward evening the Tower became blessedly cool, the walls and rust-colored marble floors radiating chill. Drumbeats echoed from the direction of the Cathedral, trails of incense wending from braziers that flanked the grand steps. Priestesses danced there, dervish-whirls of skirts and veils casting circles of dust.

Alois leaned against a terrace parapet, staring across the city, between the Cathedral's twin spires like horns, all the way to the distant dust-shimmer beyond Pavaloir's walls. Up here, the wind tasted clean, but as ever it held a bitter edge. Salt, or dust, Alois didn't know.

Silver chimed against stone as Cereza came to stand alongside him, dressed in her silver gown all spangled with stars. Her golden hair fell down her back in a mass of waves, picked clean of its pins. One of Niive's feathers was knotted into a small braid; it flashed colors in the sun. She looked like a salt-spirit, but was warm and solid as she leaned against him, her shoulder pressed to his, her arms folded on the wide stone parapet.

"What's wrong?" she asked him.

"Nothing. Hurts a bit." He flexed his hand, bandaged with staunchmoss. "I was a little overzealous with my knife, I'm afraid-"

"Alois. Come now."

"Why do you think something's wrong?"

"You should be celebrating. It's a holy night. Your people love you. Even the priests seemed satisfied, and holy men never are."

"Oh?"

"It's hard to get enough of gods." She rested her chin on her folded hands, tipping her head to look up at him with one gray eye. "You're up here instead of getting well and sotted on honey whiskey. That, dear Alois, is most dreary behavior."

"Sorry. Sorry. Really. But I..."

"You what?"

Alois let out his breath, and reached in his pocket for the scroll Azare had given him. He lifted it to the light. A small thing, and fragile.

"I asked Azare for this," he said. "To find...to find them."

Cereza gave a soft gasp. "Oh."

"Yes." The breeze buffeted the tiny scroll. Gulls tilted and whirled, far below. "The last time I spoke to her, I made her a terrible promise. I was too much of a coward for anything else."

"And now?"

"Now-" He laughed, softly. "If I'd outgrown my cowardice I would let it fall."

"So let it," Cereza said.

The gulls cried out, circling. Alois closed his eyes. His fingers curled around the tiny scroll, and he lowered his hand, tucking it inside his waistcoat once more.

Cereza watched him silently when next he lifted his head, and he looked at her, waiting for her scorn. It never came. She leaned against him, watching the city with him, the distant shimmer of the dust.

"Shall I come with you?" she asked.

Alois shook his head. "No. Stay here. Get well and sotted. Save some for me."

"I'll wait up for you."

He pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. "No, you won't."

She stuck her tongue out at him, then smiled. "Well, I still win," she said. "I'll be here either way."

Lapide and Estara, Alois thought. Once, they had been one. Once, he and Cereza might have stood atop the grand prow of Pavaloir Tower together, as king and queen. They might have stood hand in hand, bound in blood and seawater, in fine golden chains. Like Daval and Margaux, as far apart as two people could be.

But that would never be; it was never meant to be. And now they would stand apart, but not alone. Strange, to get what Daval had promised, even in this form.

***

Alois left his throne and his crimson regalia. He dismissed his servants and left instructions of his whereabouts with Lapin. He looked in on Cereza still in her silver gown, dozing at a window with a cup of tea gone cold.

Saddling his elk, he left the Tower and the dusty streets of Pavaloir and set out at sunset for the wastelands beyond.

The sun sank, its lower edge touched with crimson, bleeding out across the sky. Shadows gathered, dense in the lee faces of rocky crags and ancient tower ruins standing like sentinels against the coming night. Alois spurred his elk westward and south, along coastline for a time, then took a narrow pitted track landward, deep into the red-rock heart of the Staran mainland.

He rode, stopping for nothing save water, or to skirt the crumbling edge of what he knew to be a trap-scarab den, its center undisturbed yet undoubtedly deadly. For some hours he on occasion glimpsed peasants with their goats, bells silenced for fear of reavers, rifles slung over shoulders, but he was a solitary rider, and they did little save raise a hand in acknowledgment.

He returned the gesture, and rode on.

Night fell, so dark out here he felt as if he was deep in Sirin's shadows. The crags towered above and around him, fantastical sculptures of rust-colored stone, empty arches and rock cairns stacked by long-dead pilgrims, high spires carved by the wind, conducting it like strange music through the hollows and rifts of this desolate land.

The silence echoed. It breathed with the wind- one moment fluting and close, the next sweeping and empty as the wastes themselves, vast as the desert nothingness of the sea. Alois filled his lungs with it, rushing and clean. He lifted his head to watch a pair of rukhs wheel against the stars, and thought of witches, and storms, and godsblood tracing a path to the horizon.

He thought of the stories of Estara's beginnings, the way to their homeland lit by a falling star, its light shining over sea and sky to the islands of their one-day kingdom.

The stars had begun to fade by the time Alois, weary, aching, and dusty, glimpsed the lamplight of the village through the veils of windblown sand.

He glanced down at the contents of Azare's scroll, flattened out against his saddlehorn. A map. It had led him here- a complex of red clay buildings roofed in shale and reedy windgrass, brightly-painted shutters knocking at each other in the morning breeze.

Ancient things, these houses, lived-in since the first settlers came to Estaran shores. The oldest of them were carved into the red cliffs themselves, maintained through the centuries, rebuilt and repaired a hundred times over and still standing much as they had at the beginning. They clustered around a low, stacked-stone well in a square, shaded by wicker mats. Alois smelled cookfires, and spice, and animal musk. A few villagers were gathered at the well, women drawing up buckets of water, chivying children. Old men sprawled at stoops, pipe smoke unfurling into the still morning air.

Dawn crept across the wasteland. Somewhere Alois heard a bell ringing- goats, maybe, released from their pens, safe in the daylight from fellfoxes or reavers. He reined his elk to a halt atop the ridge overlooking the village, keeping his distance.

He watched from the shadows of his headscarf, his knuckles white on the reins.

It didn't take him long to find them.

They were amongst the other women and children at the well- a young woman, a little boy. Both wore roughspun dyed cobalt and deep-red, both as dusty and sandal-clad as the other villagers. Adele was laughing; she hauled a bucketful of water from the winch and onto the dusty ground. She did so one-handed. Her other arm was occupied with steadying a bundle. A baby? Yes, a baby in a sling.

Marin was quick to help her, taking the handle from his mother's grip and into his own. Adele ruffled Marin's hair, and he looked up at her, blue eyes bright in the first of the morning sun.

Alois felt his heartbeat, hard as blows in his chest. Go to them, he thought. Go to your little brother. Convince them to come back, to come home.

He didn't move. His elk snorted, and shook her horns, and pawed at the loose scree. Alois smoothed his hand down her flank, murmuring comforts. He watched Adele and Marin at the well, watched Adele move off with the other women, one hand on the baby's head. He watched Marin linger and scuffle in the dust, swiping a stick at the sand-gnats that hummed and flit around him.

Look here, Alois urged. Look at me.

But if he did, and Marin saw him, his brother would come to him. He'd pelt up the ridge, and Alois would have no choice but to meet him, and bring the world to him.

If you could take his place, become no one, become nothing, would you?

Leave Estara behind, leave it to the carrion birds, leave it to fester, and be free?

He never could. He never would. That wasn't freedom, not for him. But Marin deserved a choice, when the time came. If it came.

For now, let him go.

Adele called out. Marin perked up, then scrambled away, tucking himself to his mother's side. She slid her arm around his shoulders and pulled him close, bending her dark head to his. Alois saw it, then- the charm hanging around Marin's neck.

An orktooth charm. Half a broken circle of scrimshaw.

He drew a sharp breath, remembering ghosts, remembering Pavaloir burning below him. Still, he could not help but be grateful, that Enzo had given them this now, that Alois had not been proven wrong to hope.

That they had been saved, too.

"Come on, girl," Alois murmured to his elk. "Let's be off." Day was well on its way, and he had his responsibilities, and Cereza, waiting for him in Pavaloir.

With a last look at Marin, he reined his elk round, spurring her back down the ridge, down the long, dusty path toward home.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 48- Luca

***

"Luca?"

"Valere, can you hear me?" "Is he all right? Triune, he looks half-drowned-"

"He's breathing. He's alive."

"He's covered in blood. Luca!"

***

Someone shook him. Amber light seeped through his eyelids. Lamplight. The rest was darkness. Luca made his mouth move, but all to emerge was a dry rasp.

"Give me the water, quick-"

The cold rim of a canteen pressed to his mouth. Luca drank, and opened his eyes. Snow fell in spirals. Cereza knelt by his side, supporting him with one hand; her other held a storm lantern, its ork-oil flame illuminating a hazy circle in the gloom. Azare stood over him, holding the canteen and looking him over with eyes narrowed.

"Can't feel my hands," Luca muttered. "Troubling."

"Is there any whiskey?" Cereza asked Azare.

"There's some on the ship. We need to get him there, and fast. Hand me that blanket before he finishes freezing."

"Sirin," Luca croaked as Azare pulled a thick woolen blanket around his shoulders. "Where's Sirin?"

Cereza looked away. "We...we thought-"

"Is she alive?" Azare pressed.

"I don't know...she was here." Luca searched his surroundings. The ruined archway stood collapsed, the edges of the broken pillars touched silver with moonslight. Downslope, past rubble and hissing surf, Luca glimpsed the running lights of a ship- the Fishcutter, anchored in the midst of the sunken city. The silence had returned, the skies calm. Stars winked, faint and tarnished, through gusting veils of snow.

There was no sign of the Great Leviathan. There was no sign of Sirin.

"She was right here," Luca said.

He shook his arm free of the blanket. The skin of his forearm was smooth. She'd healed the handprint along with the rest of him. It was gone.

Sirin was gone.

"Azare's right," Cereza said, after a moment. She took Luca's arm and gave him a little shake. "You'll freeze out here. Come on. Ship's close by."

Luca nodded, numb. Together, she and Azare helped him to his feet, and together, a six-legged creature, they limped down the icy steps and toward the Fishcutter moored below.

Luca looked back. The ruined watchtower stood: a few crusts of walls, the shattered archway. Beyond, a faint blue glow lingered in the depths of the sea, but that was fading fast. Soon only the moonslight would remain.

The ground rumbled underneath his feet; he staggered against Azare. The crack of breaking stone filled the air, and a deep grinding shuddered up from below.

"Triune," Cereza said. "Is that-"

"We need to hurry."

"Luca? Stay with us."

"Keep him awake. Do you hear me, Valere? You have to stay awake." You must live. "You have to keep going."

***

Luca threaded in and out of consciousness. He registered crumbling rocks, the heave of waves, icy stone becoming a familiar deck. Lamplight, and the pitch and sway of the Fishcutter around him. The starlight taste of clear water, the warmth of healing magic. Alois with the Belmont cup, watching him with brimming concentration. Cereza gripping his hands, her head pressed to his knuckles, her mouth fluttering as she whispered, or sang. Niive's palm against his forehead, her golden eyes dim and fathomless. Stars shone in their depths.

Only glimpses. He tried to hold on, tried to speak, but the dark was too strong. It pulled him down; it closed over his head.

Sirin, Luca thought, but there was no answer. This time the dark was empty.

When he woke next, it was to Severin Azare's face.

Luca blinked. The Witchhunter swam into focus, bruised and battered, a web of shallow cuts marbling his cheek.

"I'm sorry to wake you," Azare said.

Luca blinked again. He struggled to his side, bracing himself on one arm. He was belowdecks, in one of the Fishcutter's cabins.

"You came for us," he said.

Azare nodded. "You know what it is to risk everything for what you believe."

"Makes two of us."

A smile curved the corner of Azare's mouth. He nodded at the door. "Someone wants you on deck, if you're well enough."

Luca pressed his fingertips to his head. He felt his pulse in them, a steady beat, nothing like its failing flutter before Sirin had healed him. She'd saved him. "The ground was shaking. What happened to Rashavir?"

Azare's face became grave again. "You'd best come see."

Luca levered himself from the bunk and to his feet. He quivered, his limbs weak, his head full of mist, but he could stand. With help from Azare, he wrapped himself in a borrowed mantle and limped onto the deck. The cold hit him like a blow, but he kept his footing. The Fishcutter listed around him, its crew working the lines. A group of pirates huddled around a lantern by the mainmast, attended to by Cereza and Niive, by Alois. His bloodied shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows. He spoke in low murmurs to the wounded, gently helping them drink from the Belmont cup.

Lord Sabat was amongst them, soaked and hunched, his greatcoat missing, his gaze downcast. As Luca limped by, he lifted his eyes. Luca nodded, and after a pause, Sabat nodded back.

Waves dashed the hull. A rumbling roar echoed over the water. Luca faced Rashavir in their wake, a long line of black water threading between icebergs. Spume crashed, and the entire ocean seemed to arch and heave, vast breakers rising, climbing the Leviathan's corpse that had once been Rashavir.

He glimpsed the great tower at its heart as it collapsed in on itself, breaking under its own weight and into the sea, huge as a falling moon. Within minutes, it was gone. The citadel of witch-queen Mazarin, the heart of an empire, devoured by the waves. Sirin's power and the Leviathan's onslaught must have been too much for the ancient city, and now, after millennia, it had given way. With a final rolling crash the ocean subsided, sea-ice settling once more. It left behind nothing but a low ridge of black stone, the upper curve of the dead Leviathan's back, and that would go under with the tide.

Luca closed his eyes. His pulse thudded in his head.

No- not his pulse.

Wingbeats.

He opened his eyes again as winged shapes skimmed the stars. Aiatar. Gasps and whispers broke out over the deck. Nadya, as if on reflex, reached for her pistol. Irene pushed her hand away, tracing the Aiatar's descent, something like longing in her mismatched eyes.

"Beautiful," Alois murmured, looking up from the wounded pirates.

"They are," Cereza said, and Niive looked down at her, brow furrowed, her hands in fists at her sides.

The great bird circled the ship once, then tilted her wings; with a flare of wind, she dropped from the sky. Wood screeched under her talons, her ragged, white-spackled wings lifted. She folded in on herself, down drifting like snow on the wind. It sifted away, leaving the shape of an old woman. Tuija. She breathed hard, her fist clenched to her heart, but her eyes were steady as she set them on Luca.

He approached her. Above, the other Aiatar circled, their black feathers nearly invisible against the sky.

"Valere," Tuija said.

"Princess," Luca said.

She drew her lips back, exposing her pointed teeth. "The monster is gone?"

"Whichever you mean, yes. She and the Leviathan both."

Tuija gave her head a little shake. "We will see," she said. "I am glad you survived. I wanted to speak with you."

"And I you. Thank you. I can never-"

"-Repay me? I think you can, Valere, which is the crux of why I come to you now. A thousand years I spent gathering the last of the Aiatar. The scattered children of the dead empire, lost to the winds. No tongue, no understanding. A foolish old woman I am, trying to prove us more than monsters."

"So prove it," Luca urged. "Come back with us. See Lapide, see Valeris. See how good it can become-"

Tuija caught Luca's hand, her claws biting deep into his wrist. Luca winced, but she held him fast.

"I know what it can become," she said. "I built it, boy. And I know that it does not need us. It does not need my power. Let that world die. And out of its bones? Build, like I did. A new world. A better one than I was ever part of."

She released him, and Luca let out his breath. Tuija held his gaze for a moment, then faced Niive.

"You have a place with us, always," she said. "If you want it."

Niive slipped her hand round Cereza's and held tight. "My place is here."

Tuija shrugged. "Suit yourself, girl."

She turned her back on Luca, and transformed. He narrowed his eyes against the backdraft of her wings, the rush of storm wind sweeping the deck. Her neck arched, facing the sky as she prepared to launch herself into it.

"Wait," Luca called.

Tuija paused. Her head swiveled round, and she looked down at him with a hawk's golden stare.

"Did we heal it?" Luca said. "Will the Leviathan come back?"

She did not answer, but Luca could see the question echoed in her eyes, and with it: hope, pure, bitter, and merciless. That was all she could give him. That was all she had.

She swooped into the sky, rejoining the other Aiatar. The sails groaned; the ship settled. The storm wind fell from the air, and the cold once again filled Luca's bones. At once he felt his exhaustion, the weight of the sea on his shoulders.

Cereza came to his side and slipped her arm around his waist. She leaned her head to his shoulder. Together they watched the Aiatar until they were gone, until the sky was empty of all but stars.

"Do you think it will come back?" Cereza asked, after a while.

"I don't know."

She nudged him. "Do you think she'll come back?"

Luca had no answers for her, and none for himself, either. All he had was that hope- that Sirin was alive, and so was the Leviathan.

It was not such an impossible hope. He'd believed impossible things before. Tonight, tomorrow, for as long as it took, he would believe them again.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 47- Azare

***

Cereza stood at the bow, her eyes closed, her hair streaming behind her like a pale banner. The sea still churned, full of swells like hills and seamed with froth. Icebergs loomed from the mist, lit from within by the Leviathan's light.

It filled the sky, a glorious, ever-shifting aurora. Rumbles coursed through the ocean, making the Fishcutter pitch and sway on the waves, but the witch-winds kept them steady.

The Fishcutter's crew worked the ropes, the sails, shouts and orders flying from pirate to pirate like trained birds. They worked like the Witchhunters had, like a single mind. Irene strode between them, clapping men on their backs, loosing lines, directing Nadya at the wheel. Azare faced the seas, the clifflike shadows of ruined walls, the looming mass of Rashavir beyond, its great central tower barely visible in the darkness.

"You think he's in there?" Ziva muttered, at his side. She leaned against the gunwale, hunched in a blanket, her hair straggling in damp curls around her face. "You think Valere could have survived...that?"

"She does," Azare said, nodding at Cereza. Her witch, Niive, held her hand, keeping her steady on the deck. Cereza's eyes flickered behind closed lids, her jaw winched tight, her entire body trembling with strain.

Searching.

Niive took Cereza's shoulder, and Cereza leaned into her touch, as if without thinking. Azare knew she wouldn't stop until she found her brother, no matter how unlikely her chances.

Ziva watched Cereza, too, the look in her eyes raw and burning. Azare knew that look. It was a single-minded ferocity that had picked open the locked depths of his heart over so many years, over so many battles together, and the moments between, tender with guilt and all too swift.

He thought of the first time he'd seen her, a bloodied orphan at the feet of gods and kings. He remembered a time a few years into her training, the two of them resting together after a bout, the first time she'd grown skilled enough for the Royal Witchhunter to personally test her bladework. She was eighteen, ever bruised and covered in cuts. This fight was the culmination of years of training; soon she'd be awarded her grays.

She'd lost, and spectacularly, too, her strikes unskilled and wild, her technique clumsy, as if she still held a mining tool instead of a sword. All the same, Azare had felt a strange thrill as he'd fought her, as she'd snarled at him from the far end of her sword, striking again and again with what was clearly all her strength. Even when he swept her sword out of her hands and kicked her to the dusty hardpan of the training ground she'd twisted back to her feet, scrambling for her weapon before she realized the fight was over.

Here was a girl, Azare had thought, who'd lost all else but herself. Here was a girl who had never doubted.

Afterward he'd offered her his canteen. She'd stared at it, her bare, sweaty brown arms hooked over her knees, and gave her head a little toss.

S' all right. I just need a breather.

He'd laughed at her defiance. You trained hard today, Cadet. No shame in resting.

Ziva had smiled, the first time he'd ever seen her do so: that unforgettable hook of a grin, its barbed point biting deep into his memories. Wordless, she'd held out her hand, and he'd slapped the canteen in.

He'd thought about her smile, days after, and after, catching sight of her once again as she whirled and stumbled her way through a drill against another cadet. Drenched in sunlight, dust in the air. Dust in the seams of her skin. He found himself watching her face for it, and feeling its absence snag at him inside.

Now, he leaned alongside her, shoulders curled in. Matching postures of weariness. A space lingered between them, unbreached, persistent.

"You should rest," Azare said.

"Hells with you."

"You nearly died, Lapin."

"I'll sleep in my grave. There's work to be done."

"Ziva," Azare said softly, and she looked up at him, her eyes salt-reddened and sharp, her face bruised, crescents of her own blood under her nails.

"I want you by my side," he said.

"I know that."

"Then why does it feel like you're about to tell me what I least want to hear?"

"Because you know me, Severin."

"Tell me anyway."

She slid her hand over the railing. She wanted to say more, Azare knew, but she in her stormy way was keeping it in, keeping it hidden.

"This whole tub must have been painted bright as a brothel, once," she muttered, picking at one of the carved balusters. "There are still a few traces of pigment. There, and there."

He couldn't see anything. "You can tell?" he asked, impressed.

She looked up at him with a shrug. "My mother used to paint the icons of the Saints in our village. Our courtyard walls, too. In the middle of the Ibaris wasteland, that courtyard was like a bloody garden."

"Did you paint?"

"She never taught me." Ziva lowered her hand. "Don't think I'd be too good at it, anyway."

"I don't know about that."

"Have you ever seen me hold a brush, Azare?"

"Like I said, Lapin, you nearly died. You'll have a lot of free time during your upcoming convalescence."

They fell silent. It was a comfortable silence. There were no secrets, not anymore. There was nothing but Ziva and his own foolish heart. So many years together and now there seemed to be nothing to talk about. She had killed him, and she had died, and both of them had come back, against all hope, to stand in the starlight, to have nothing to say.

Alois attended to the wounded around them, the pirates Irene had pulled from the waves, half-frozen and blistered with spellburn. He went from one to the next, kneeling at their sides, dipping the Belmont cup in a bucket of water he carried with him, withdrawing mouthfuls. He healed the wounded himself, directed Irene's crew and the remaining Witchhunters for blankets, bandages, the Fishcutter's supply of night-drop and disinfectant spirit. He worked without cease, his head down, his eyes straight, not minding his own bared arms and ice-caught curls.

A rush of feeling filled Azare, so strong it hurt. His vision trembled, his eyes warm. Ziva's hand slid up his shoulder, her fingers idly twining through his hair.

"Will you return to your village?" he asked her. "In Ibaris?"

She shook her head. "There's nothing for me there now, not even ghosts. Certainly not my family. They wouldn't want that for me, I think. To be buried with them."

"They come back," Azare murmured. He remembered Daval, his friend bloody in the sunrise. He remembered Margaux, remembered her eyes. He felt her amber gaze, haunting, even now. "They always do."

"Damn them. Damn the dead. It's us alive now."

Her voice was fierce, and it tugged a smile from him. He tipped his head, resting it on her hand. "You always had the better measure of faith between us."

"And you always saw it, even when I couldn't."

"What a pair we make."

"I don't know what I can be to you," Ziva said. "Not now. Not yet. But I know what I can be to him."

She nodded to Alois. He knelt before a young boy with blood matting his curls. With a start, Azare realized it was Elias, the young Estaran sailor who'd come with Ziva back across the Arm. The boy who'd first seen the Great Leviathan and brought back word of its return, who'd survived so much along the way. Now, he wore salt rags and an ork-hide bandoleer like the rest of the pirates, and seemed as if he'd become a part of the Fishcutter's crew with little enough ceremony.

Good; he had the look of a rigging spider about him, made for the high ropes all tangled with stars.

Alois set the Cup to his mouth, speaking to him so softly Azare couldn't make out his words. Alois, the king of Estara, who would kneel at the side of a mad boy, to feed him healing water at the edge of the world.

Ziva saw it, too. Her brow was furrowed.

"I will serve him," she said. "I'll see he's protected, see he's safe. Help him where he needs it. Guard him with all my strength."

"I don't doubt it."

"Estara doesn't need a warlord now," Ziva said. "It needs a healer. It needs him, and it needs me, more than you do." Her mouth tightened into a smile. "You told me once we don't always get what we want."

Snow flurried down, winking in the ice wind. Azare lifted his eyes to the sky, to the Aiatar wheeling through the snow. They were barely visible against the dark sky, little more than the stirrings of vast wings and flickers of their lightning.

"Promise me one thing," Azare said.

Ziva snorted. "Am I a witch, now?"

"Promise me."

She turned her face to his. Her eyes were filled with lamplight, muted and golden. No more the Leviathan's light, no more glory. It was just her.

"Come back to me, Ziva," he said. "One day, come back to me."

"I- I don't know," she said. "I- Azare-"

She cut off, then began again. "Severin..."

The blanket had slipped from her shoulders, her hair dusted with ice. She must have been freezing, but she didn't show it. Azare was still, tensed, waiting.

"Severin," Ziva said once more, and this time his name on her lips was an answer, flush with fervent, furious hope.

Azare listened to the sound of his name on her tongue, in her Ibaris accent, as familiar to him as his own voice. He bent to her, pressed his forehead to hers, her eyes closed, her lashes brushing his skin. Her hands climbed his chest, settling just over his heart. He felt her trace the ridges of his whaleglass scars, the wounds she'd made, the killing blow she'd carved into him.

A moment of stillness, as if suspended, all the world contained within the faint rhythm of her breathing.

For that moment, he thought she would pull away.

Then her warm hand clasped his. It felt like an anchor point, the line where sky met sea. Uncrossable, perhaps, but side by side nevertheless.

"I should go help him," she murmured.

"You do know your way around a surgeon's kit."

Ziva grinned. "And the king'll turn the poor lad to chum, the way he's handling that needle."

She stood, and turned, shedding her blanket. She went to Alois and the open surgeon's kit, rummaging inside for spirit and shears so she might attend to injuries the Cup couldn't staunch. Azare watched her work for a while, then faced the dark waves once more, valleys and ice-ridden peaks, crashing black water. Rifts of blue light winnowed through the depths. The Leviathan's light; the Leviathan's blood.

Where had it gone? Had it survived, or had Daval gotten at last what he'd wanted, and slaughtered it in the end?

The boy, Elias, was watching the horizon too. Azare wondered if he was searching for that first flare of blue, that first gust of storm wind.

We saw its light fade, Azare wanted to tell him. We all saw it vanish into the sea. It didn't come back, lad. It may never again.

He didn't. The Leviathan was gone, but Azare didn't think it was so forever. The rains came; the flowers opened. It was never truly gone, no matter how the seas remained dark. Folk lived, and died, lives rising and falling like the tide. From what he understood, that was the Leviathan, as much as the whale itself. In that way, it would never die.

Wings stirred the air, and pressure rose and settled, a by-now familiar sting of cool wind. Azare glanced up to the witch-boy. He perched on the gunwale, wings lifted to keep his balance, hugging his knees to his skinny chest.

"Watching for the whale?" he asked Azare.

"For Luca Valere."

The witch shook his head. "Little chance. Poor Luca lies drowned, I fear."

Azare didn't see how Luca could have survived the Leviathan's onslaught, either, but the Valere lad had an uncanny knack for the impossible.

He shrugged. "I'll keep searching as long as his sister does."

The witch glanced at him, slyly. "What's that, now, Witchhunter?"

Azare met his golden gaze. "You heard me."

"So you did listen."

"You look like a gutterscrap, but something in me suspects you're worth listening to."

The boy let out his breath, and for the first time there was not satisfaction in his eyes, nor anger, nor pain, nor fear. He watched the other Aiatar in the sky, watched the crumbling towers of Rashavir through the snow. Azare thought, once again, of Daval, of sunrise, of the longing in his eyes, the years taken away.

"I have seen more of sea and sky than most, it's true," the witch-boy said. "Even amongst we Aiatar. I remember when Mazarin was nothing more than a brilliant girl, always staring at the horizon, always waiting for the first, breaching flare of blue light. She only ever wanted more. I remember watching her rise and doing nothing, though I knew it was wrong. Imbalance, destruction. I thought I could be apart from it, above it. But there is no being apart from it, not when I had the means to stop it."

Azare nodded. He knew what the boy meant.

"Will you go with the other Aiatar?" he asked.

"Perhaps," the boy said. "Or perhaps I will go alone. There are still so many dark reaches in this world I have not flown."

He tilted his head to the side, shrewd once more. "Why should you care?"

"Because you did," Azare said. "Because it's better to be alive. Because I'm grateful to you, even now."

He touched his heart and felt the curse twist inside him.

Never again, he thought.

The boy let out a laugh like a hawk's rasp. "So you think all this was worth it?"

There was something in his voice, something that made Azare face him. The boy's thin shoulders were hunched, his claws clutched over his knees as he watched the horizon. For Luca? For that first flare of blue light? For only the dawn? Whatever it was, Azare turned outward again, content to watch for it with him.

"You told me yourself," Azare told him, softly.

"Tell me again."

"You can't get it back," Azare said. "You can't get back what's gone."

A crooked smile spread over the boy's face. "I'll remember that, Witchhunter," he said. "I'll remember you."

"Maybe I'll see you again," Azare said.

He heard the boy laugh once more, soft and bitter. "Keep watching."

Wind rose, and died. Azare looked up. The boy was gone. A ragged shadow winged its way through the curtains of snow. Nothing remained in his place, nothing but black down drifting, and that was quickly gone, too.

A shout came from the lookout, high above on the rigging. The Fishcutter's sails groaned as the ship changed course, ploughing through the next wave in a great spray of white spume.

Azare strode to Cereza's side at the bow. She clutched the railing, her hair lashing around her in their furious new wind. She pointed to the crag of dark rock looming ahead, sea churning at its feet. The remnants of an ancient wall. A broken archway clung to its heights, cut out sharp against the Leviathan's aurora.

"One of the Aiatar saw him," Cereza said, breathless, wide-eyed.

"Is it-" Azare began.

Cereza nodded. "It's Luca. We've found him."

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 46- Luca

***

Luca slid from Kyosi's back and onto icy stone. The Aiatar had landed on broad battlements atop a crumbling wall. It jutted from the sea that flooded Rashavir, standing amidst currents strong enough to rip Luca apart. The ruined city around them looked torn, the world scraped sideways. The moons shone through scraps of cloud, but their light seemed pale, weaker than before.

Luca saw why. Over a few feet of spume and iron-colored waves, the world stopped.

A great, churning sphere of darkness encompassed a slice of dead Rashavir, impossibly dense, like a trick of the eye. Above it, the sky spiraled into the familiar coil of a maelstrom, as if within the storm Sirin had warped the world, had centered it around her own power, pulling all things to her as she drew in the Leviathan.

Luca searched the dark for any sign of Sirin, but saw nothing in the shadows. They whispered, writhing, serpentine, an ever-shifting mass stretching to the sky.

"Hells," he muttered.

"I've never seen anything like this." Kyosi's voice was faint. "She's in there? She's controlling the storm?"

"Or it's controlling her." Luca's pulse thudded in his throat; he tasted acid on the back of his tongue, and her magic, bitter as old blood.

"Not good either way," he went on. "Not for us. Worse for her."

He stepped to the broken edge of the wall, lifting a hand against the wind. The wall of darkness, the outer edge of the shadow storm, was mere feet from the edge of the wall. Close enough to reach for, close enough to touch.

"Sirin," Luca whispered.

He reached out, toward the shadows, toward her.

A gout of spray dashed against the wall, soaking him to the skin. Luca cried out and stumbled back; the water was like ice, stealing all heat from him. He caught himself on the flank of a statue, breathing hard. Kyosi had shifted back to his human form, his wings lifted, great dark fans against the blizzard sky. His eyes glowed as he stared into the shadows.

"This is as far as I go," he said. "Inside there..." He shook his head with a hiss. "It'll rip the two of us apart."

"Figured you'd say something like that." Luca scrubbed his knuckles over his mouth, then fumbled open his coat and let it drop in a sodden heap behind him. If Kyosi was right, it would do nothing but slow him down.

"What are you doing, Valere?" Kyosi snarled.

"You said it yourself. It'll rip us apart." The knife still hung at his belt. He touched its hilt, and fear spiked his heart. "If it's to be one of us, it had best be me."

He grit his teeth and climbed atop the parapet. The wind tore past him, drowning his thoughts, lashing his face with fragments of ice. Luca took a deep, cold breath and faced the shadows. He felt again his heartbeat, the steady pulse of it, the rush of his blood through his veins.

He reached out.

His fingertips brushed the surface of her shadows.

Cold shot through him, worse than the wind, worse than the arctic sea, coiling through his blood and freezing him to the core. The shadows rippled in rings outward from his hand. Their whispers became howls, became keening cries, shrieking sobs, wild laughter. His pulse raced; the taste of Sirin's magic was stronger now, burning down his throat.

Overhead, the moonslight faded. Luca glanced up, and saw with a pang the last flicker of silver light before Sirin's shadows closed over the face of the great moon, swallowing it and its siblings in darkness. The three black moons hung heavy in the dark sky, darker still, the endless well of the Leviathan's eye, the nothingness between the stars.

Her gaze, steady, bird-black, set on him.

"It'll kill you, Valere," Kyosi cried, somewhere behind him. His voice echoed, as if coming from a long way off.

"Maybe," Luca said. "I'll risk it."

For her, he would.

He pressed his palm to the shadows. He felt a resistance, then a give, and the shadow buckled under his hand, tearing open, swallowing it whole. Force clamped down on him, wrenching his arm at the shoulder.

Luca lost feeling below the elbow. He gasped, his eyes snapping wide. Power rushed through him; light danced in his vision.

I'm coming, Sirin.

He reached deeper. Shadow veined up his arm, through his flesh, biting down. He couldn't resist it anymore. He didn't want to.

Luca braced himself and leaped off the edge of the wall, into empty air, into the dark.

***

He fell- through darkness, through howling wind, through stars.

He hit ground hard. Pain cracked through his body as he slumped on his hands and knees, raking breath after breath. The air was thin, stripped, difficult to fill his lungs on. His hair whipped around his head, caught in the storm wind.

Shadows hissed at his skin, nosing and twining. His fingers spread on reflex, sinking deeper into black sand.

Luca lifted his head, shaken, still catching at his breath. Sand stretched away, away- a wasteland of it black and glistening, carved with ripples as the unearthly wind hissed over it, catching up veils and sending them spinning. The sky was starless night, gusting and hazy. The black moons hung huge, looming motionless past the shadows. Each inhale burned down Luca's throat, colder even than Rashavir beyond.

He glanced over his shoulder. Nothing but shadow, nothing but sand. He filled his palm with it and let it trickle through his fingers. It felt cold, sharp, like chips of obsidian.

"Sirin?" he called.

His voice echoed into the misty nothingness, warped and strange. Whispers chased it, the edge of a sob drawn long and keening, and at its tail end-

A cry.

It jolted him to his feet, scrambling, shaking. Puppy's whimper. It was gone before he could get a sense of where it came from.

"Puppy!" He searched the sand. Nothing but shadow, nothing but haze and darkness, and somewhere in the far distance: the crash of waves, as if against rock.

"I'm here," he yelled. "I'm coming. Hold on. Just hold on."

He started forward. Wind drove against him; he lowered his head and pushed through it, teeth grit. Sand stung at his face. A hazy shape swam toward him, and he struggled toward it.

The sand hummed underfoot; the shape grew closer, the hum becoming a rumble through the constant howl of wind. Without warning the prow of a ship loomed from the shadows, made of their dark matter, glistening black and ever-shifting. Luca flung himself away as the prow reared over him, as if to crush him down into the shadows at his feet. The ship rose on a wave of black sand and fell, crashing past Luca and settling with a groan onto its side.

He stumbled back, out of the billowing sand-clouds kicked up by the ship's impact. Its shape was warped, smeared along its edges, as if seen through a faulty spyglass. Its bowsprit jutted like a tusk, its bow jagged and snarling, like a pair of vast jaws. The sails filled and boomed, deep as the echoes of cannon fire.

Screams followed the echoes- a child's scream, raw and terrible, and shouts in Lapidaean, commands roared through the rattle of bullets, the rippling crackle of flames catching. Luca flinched as they lit the shadows, phantom fire that climbed the darkness around him like a wick touched to a theater backdrop.

You! Search the village.

Already did. Nothing there, sir, just old women.

Then burn it, too. Don't want to leave anyone for the next ship comes through here. This is our haul, you hear me?

"Triune," Luca whispered. He staggered as the ship began to crumble, blown away by the wind- black sand, collapsing in on itself, becoming nothing. The flames extinguished themselves, burning in wells and spirals across the black sand and illuminating the shadows in witchlight flickers. More shapes appeared ahead, around him, at once everywhere: people dressed in sealskins, their hair ornately braided round their heads. They all had Sirin's broad cheekbones, her tilted eyes, sparks of firelight dancing in their depths. They were running, pulling at each other's hands, dozens of small figures wreathed in ghostly embers, scrambling away from the ship. One of them knocked against him, solid and real, face shining with tears.

Children, Luca realized with a wrench deep in his heart.

The screams became louder, became sobs, howls, pleas.

The slavers, Luca thought. Her people. The other children.

The ship must have been how she remembered the one that had come to her island, as a little girl. It must have seemed monstrous, like something out of a nightmare, and disgorging nightmares, and fire, and knives. If that was how she remembered it, then this, these screams, those commands in Lapidaean- those were memories. Sirin's worst memories. Devastation and terror beyond imagining. The collapse of her world, the bloody death of Alkona. Her friends, captured or slaughtered, lost to the seas.

Was the Leviathan making her see this? Was this what her power fed on? Her fear, amplified, tearing horrors from the black depths of her memory and feeding them back to her in some ghastly carnival, inescapable, unending?

More shapes swam from the shadows, more scraps of remembered sound. A crumbled battlement wall, a cliffside crowned with a trio of towering sentinel stones. A lullaby, soft, strange, and lilting, sung in a language Luca couldn't name. Everywhere came the flicker and arch of spirit-fire and lightning. He ducked under and through the raised arms and clashing swords of Lapidaean statues, Valere kings and queens, jutting from the darkness like ruins themselves. The blade-slither of a razor storm, the high keen of wind, eerie and cold. The boom of waves, as if in a deep sea cave, some lonely place far from the light.

Black sand hissed past Luca's face. It sting at his half-closed eyes, memories disintegrating as he pushed on, past them, deeper and deeper in the shadow storm.

Where are you? He searched the dark, again, again, but there was no forward in this place, no sense of direction. He might have been running in circles, lost like some sailor paddling the doldrums with a single broken oar.

His hands throbbed, dead with cold. He lifted them and felt a deep pang in his gut. His skin was blanched gray, fingertips pale as ash. As he watched, the edges of his hands began to blur, as if melting away on the wind.

He remembered the warship Sirin had left in the ice, the way she'd drunk it dry. All the world would be this way if the Leviathan reached her, all things unmade. An arc unfinished, a circle, broken. Luca felt his pulse in his mouth, tasted the bitter salt wind of this place on the back of his tongue. She was drinking him dry, too. Much longer and he'd be little more than ash, little more than shadows and dust.

Tears stung at his eyes. His fingers curled into fists.

"And you can have it," he whispered. "Every last drop of me, if that's what it bloody takes."

Another cry echoed from far away. Puppy again. The call cut off in a strangled yelp. Luca broke into a run; the wind buffeted at him, forcing him back, but he pushed through. His muscles quivered, winched tight by the cold.

"Puppy," he cried. "Hold on-"

Wind scoured past him, and he cut off, stumbling to a halt. It coiled, whisking aside the shadows, making a clearing around the crouching shape of a child. A little girl. She wore a sealskin parka and woolen cape, her hair twisted around her head in ornate braids. She clung to her knees, pulling them tight to her chest, rocking back and forth.

"Sirin?" Luca said.

Her head snapped up. Her eyes glinted, wide and black. She clutched something: a doll of carved driftwood, its neck wreathed in yellow flowers, its eyes set with chips of shell. With a gasp she scrambled to a crouch, the doll pressed to her heart.

"Sirin," Luca said. "It's all right."

He knew it was, in some way her, truly her. She felt more real than anything else in this place. He approached, slowly, and knelt to her level. Her breathing was fast, her grip tight on the driftwood doll.

She whispered something in an unfamiliar language.

"Show me," Luca urged her. "Show me how to help you."

She stared at him, then stood, and spun, and sprinted into the dark.

"Wait-" He lunged after her. The knife jounced at his side. Wind flattened against him, tearing, nearly flinging him off his feet. He braced against it, shaking; through the fingers of his raised hand, he glimpsed the girl running toward a break in the shadows, glimpsed a shape beyond jutting through curtains of black sand, its edges wreathed in a trace of many-colored light.

A tower atop a crag. An archway, broken into twin arcs like a pair of vast ribs, its upper point long gone. The shadows circled it: the linchpin of the storm. A span of broad stone steps led to the watchtower, chewed and gnawed by time. Coursing waves hissed and dashed in sprays of spume against the base of the steps.

Luca heard the rumble of a monstrous bellow, the entire sea parting as the Leviathan swam closer.

In the dark:

A wink of blue, blue as godsblood.

Puppy. It shone in the broken archway, at the watchtower's peak. Luca saw her, then: Sirin, facing the coming Leviathan, calling it. She clutched Puppy in her arms like the child had clutched the driftwood doll.

His heart raced. She was there. She was still alive.

He staggered toward her, toward the base of the steps, the pair of winged statues flanking its base. The steps were great slabs of black stone, seamed with ice and made slick by sea-spray. Luca flung himself up them, toward the black moons hanging overhead. Each beat of his pounding heart was hard as a stab, his muscles screaming, his body spent.

Luca didn't stop. The wind snapped and tore. He tasted blood as sand sliced over his cheek. He cried out, sliding to a halt on the next step. The shadows swirled around him; the blood on his cheek flashed icy, its heat stolen.

He was so cold.

He no longer felt his face, his hands. Luca lifted them; they quivered, pale to the knuckles, fingertips sifting away with the wind. His body felt fragile, its limits flickering- his, then no longer his. He was the darkness, or in it- he couldn't tell which. The shadows rolled from Sirin, wave after wave of them, power vibrating at the skin of the world, eating away at the connections between things.

Of course. The watchtower wasn't the storm's center. Sirin was, and she held it in her grip. So fragile, Luca saw now. Everything so fragile, so easily broken.

No.

Some things were stronger. Some powers were greater. He summoned her face, her hands that were her voice, into his head.

Get up, Valere.

He forced himself to stand, to move. He dragged himself ahead, one step, another, but he was so weak.

He collapsed to his knees again. Shadow billowed around him, a swarm of whispers rising in his head.

"Come on," he said, his voice raw and breaking. He tried to push himself to his feet. His arms didn't obey him. He lifted his head, searching for Sirin, for Puppy. Blue light trembled in his lashes. "I...I made you a bloody promise."

He didn't know who he was speaking to. Sirin, maybe. Himself. The Leviathan. Perhaps the Leviathan's voice had never been more than his own.

His voice caught on itself, a sob, torn from his depths. His vision blurred. Was he crying? He didn't know. His edges faded. He was fading.

No, he wanted to call. With the last of his strength, he reached out.

High above, Sirin turned.

***

Luca?

***

He heard her.

He felt her in the dark.

It was as if his consciousness had dissolved and become the shadows. He saw himself, his hand outstretched, his body rigid and shaking, black blooming and veining like inky bruises under his skin. His eyes were wide, sightless, black bursting through their sclera, turning them as dark as Sirin's.

She was there.

I'm here, he told her.

He was in the dark, her power veining through him, tearing him apart.

She was there.

Sirin, I'm coming.

He remembered the maelstrom, the schooner, her net of shadows. Her power inside him then as now, crushing the water from his lungs, saving him. He remembered how Alois had spoken to her, through her. How Isabella had shared Enzo's power, all the stronger for it. How Sirin had taken and given as they fled Valeris, using his strength as her own.

A connection through all things.

A balance.

His substance was in her, now, consumed by her. In turn it made this darkness, made this storm, more and more each part of him it took.

Sirin, I'm here.

All things made one.

I make-

I unmake-

I build the world anew-

He reached out, through the storm, through her. "I can help you," he whispered. "Let me help you."

He saw her, then, saw her above him. Sirin hung in the broken archway, the last remnant of the ruined watchtower. Her feet drifted, suspended just above the ground. Her shadows swirled around her, a living, breathing mass. Her short curls were haloed by the black moons overhead.

Her lips were parted, her eyes wide and shining.

Each line of her face was taut with strain or agony, each muscle in her body rigid, as if carved in place. She held Puppy. The little creature struggled, twisting against her grip. It yelped as it saw Luca, short claws scrabbling at Sirin's arms.

She didn't seem to feel them. She didn't seem to feel anything- not the cold, not the devouring wind, not fear as the Leviathan coursed closer and closer through the sea, through her storm.

Tears streamed down Luca's face. "Sirin," he choked. "I saw the little girl. I know she's still here. I know you're still here. Please."

She didn't move. She didn't hear him. A sob tore its way from Luca's throat. He pulled himself up the next step, closer to her.

"Please, Sirin," he begged. "Come back to me. Come home. Anywhere, anything. Be with me, Sirin, just stop. Rest, and stop."

I can't.

Her eyes were on him. She was there, in them.

I can't, she said. In him, through him- it wasn't a voice, nor her hands speaking. It was just her. Her face was tear-stained and bruised, a gash rusting on her cheek. I can't. It hurts, Luca. It hurts so much.

"You can stop. You can, I know you can."

It's too much. If I let it go, it will kill me.

"Then...then let me hold it for you."

She clutched at Puppy. It's too strong-

"Maybe it is. But that doesn't mean you have to be alone with it." He staggered to his feet, closer, close enough to reach out and touch her. He held out one hand. The other brushed the hilt of his dagger. "You don't have to bear it alone. Let me take it. Let me help you. I'm here. I'll always be here, as long as you need me."

The Leviathan's roar shook through his body. The light shivered in his eyes. Sirin stared down at him, ragged and bloody and bruised with shadow, breaking apart with each new heartbeat. He took her hand, pulling it gently from Puppy. It was warm, and real. She was real.

She was there.

I can't, she said again. I can't let this go. This power. This power-

She cut off, her face creasing in pain.

So many years, Luca, so much death. So much pain. I have to make it right. You must understand. I have to make it right.

"I know," Luca said.

His hand closed on the dagger hilt. In one swift movement, he drew it, and flung it. The dagger spun over the cliffside, winking in the blue light, gone in an instant.

"It won't be right," Luca said. "The world never will be. Not without you in it."

Waves rose, climbing up the cliffside and toward the watchtower, flooding the ruins with sprays of blue radiance. The Leviathan loomed above them, a mass of muscle and glistening spellburnt hide, the gold in its eyes flaring to fire as the light caught them.

Sirin's gaze never left Luca's. Her shoulders rose and fell, her shadows closing in. Puppy gave a soft yip. Its eyes reflected the glow of its counterpart, its fur rippling with soft colors, like whaleglass, like the last of the fading aurora.

It brightened; it pulsed. Sirin's hands tightened in its fur. She bent her head to Puppy's, and the little creature licked her face, cleaning it of blood with its rough black tongue.

The Leviathan's maw opened. Seawater gushed forth. Luca tasted it as it drenched the watchtower, warm and amniotic, teeming with life. Its teeth glistened, an endless, jagged expanse. It could crush them and these ruins into nothing. It could devour them whole. It didn't. It roared, and its lightning crackled. The world flashed white.

Sirin faced the monster.

Luca felt the magic like a surge, like a wind, not around him but through him- through the air, the stone at his feet, though the breath in his lungs, through the blood cycling inside him. It blasted away the shadows and flung him off his feet. He slammed back against the archway, reeling at its strength, Sirin's strength, keeping the beast back and drawing it in all at once.

Sirin lifted Puppy. A pair of waves dashed together, peeling away from one another. Through them, the Leviathan's glow was like the sun through stained glass, searing and brilliant. Around Luca, the shadows splintered to ash. The stone archway cracked, shards of black rock raining off the cliffside, lost in the radiance.

The light poured across them. The Leviathan's body thrashed, churning the seas below to froth. Luca scrambled to Sirin's side. She glanced at him, and he set his hands to Puppy, supporting the creature's body in turn.

Its fur seared his hands, but he kept hold. It blinked down at him, eyes bright with fear and confusion.

"Don't be afraid," Luca whispered. "I'm here."

The Leviathan broke. It peeled away from itself, like the waves. Its shining hide became abyss, became stars. Its maw unfurled, again, and again, and again. An endlessness of light. Those stars danced in Luca's eyes; magic pulsed stronger, unearthly, unbearable. He felt the heat of its blood, of its starry flesh. He tasted the salt of the seawater, bitter in his mouth.

The light closed in, surrounding them.

Puppy's weight faded from his hands.

Luca's strength snapped. He crumpled against Sirin, and she caught him, bearing them both to the ground. He felt warmth returning, slowly- warmth, and wet, spreading under his shirt. His hands were pale, curled on the black stone. His heartbeat fluttered, weak, failing. The power had taken too much from him. Always such a cost, and someone had to pay it. Blood pooled beneath him, reflecting the stars.

The Great Leviathan shone- radiant, glorious, not dying, but made whole again.

"Amazing," he murmured.

He felt Sirin's fingertips against his face. She stroked his hair, his cheek. Luca lifted his eyes, and found her. She looked down at him.

What? she signed.

"Just glad to be here," Luca said. "With you. Always with you."

Your eyes are back. Good. I like them.

"I'm pleased to hear it."

Shame about your nose.

He tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. Even the Leviathan's light seemed lesser than before, further away. This was a peaceful dark now. He didn't mind it so much- to fade into the dark, to go toward it, unafraid.

But Sirin's hold on him was too strong. She slipped her hands around his head, turning his face toward the sky. Wisps of cold touched Luca's face. His vision flickered. He saw the Leviathan, its radiance collapsing in on itself. It filled the sea, the sky. It encircled them: endless rivers of blue light, the swinging aurora, the pathways of stars overhead. The moons were once again full, their light dense as touch on his upturned face.

Let me help you now, Sirin signed.

She pressed her hands to his heart. Power pulsed from her, a scrap compared to what she'd commanded before. Her shadows twined into him- not to wound, but to heal. They washed through him; they took the pain. The pressure on his heart lessened, the spreading blood staunched. He felt his hands again. He felt the strong, steady beat of his heart.

Still the darkness lingered, the world receding with each beat. He was going to pass out. It was a wonder he hadn't before.

You must live, Sirin signed.

"Sirin," Luca whispered.

She drew her face to his, her mouth warm on his. Her darkness closed over him, like the tide, and just as gentle.

***

I am not afraid.

A flash of silver, a flicker of blue. The warmth of a hand clasping his, fingers weaving, holding on.

It's all right.

I'll be with you.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 45- Ziva

***

Saints alive, Ziva thought. That's big.

Onboard the Mistfox, she stared, her mouth open, her eyes wide, as the beast surged against the wall of spellfire. Its howl sheared through the winds and into her skull. She couldn't take it in, not all at once. It was the Great Leviathan on a monstrous scale, a landscape of glistening black hide and spears of lightning scouring the world white and the seas pale.

Before, it had come like a tide, the sea rising at its approach, pulling stars in its wake. Life had come with it, sea creatures and beasts of the deep drawn along like handmaidens.

She'd burned and butchered it then. Now she stood rigid, her hands clamped to the wheel, her guts watery with fear. No more a god of life and death, this beast. This was the destroyer, come to do its ghastly work.

She'd hear its shriek in her nightmares. She'd hear it to the end of her days, if she rode this out alive.

The waves were the worst she'd seen, a mountain range of iron-colored water and swells to shatter ships, veined in spume and god-glow, the entire ocean lit from beneath by that glimmering blue tide. Snow lashed the Mistfox, sails groaning, the whole ship like a child's toy tossed into a storm. Her hands ached on the wheel; her crew were silhouettes through spray and coursing waves.

"Keep her steady!" she ordered, her voice nearly drowned by the storm.

The witch-boy held the winds in check, filling their sails, keeping the monster's storm from overwhelming them. The Mistfox hung back, holding the line. The Fishcutter, Sabat's flagship, and Noor were at the fore, ready with the bolt cannons, loosing volleys against the beast's front and flanks to hem it in and keep it penned.

Just like herding goats, Ziva thought, except this time it wasn't with a stick and a fence, but with spellfire bolts. She glimpsed the other ships through the driving sleet. The closest was Anoshka's icerunner, her flames unfurled like a glowing orange flower, keeping the worst of the sea-ice at bay. She'd brought the armada north, her flames and her knowledge of the ice, but even her fire was nothing against the monster.

The ice was treacherous, bergs big as ships thrown on the waves. One surged past, barely avoiding the Mistfox. The crack of breaking wood echoed over the wind, and screams, as it rammed into one of the pirate vessels.

"No!" Ziva whirled, but it was lost to the next wave, a ruin of torn canvas and shattered wood already sucked to the deeps.

She steeled herself and faced front again, faced Azare where he stood, one hand on the gunwale, his eyes narrowed against the wind. Cereza was at his side, her hair stuck to her cheeks with the salt spray, while Alois held her shoulder, keeping them both steady.

"That bolt won't keep it for long," Ziva called.

Azare shook his head. "Just a warning shot."

The wall of spellfire burned lower, already half-extinguished by the sleet. The Leviathan bellowed again; it shook the waves to a froth.

Lightning struck the sea, and Ziva felt it crackle through her hair.

"I say we kill the bloody beast," she snarled.

"Not yet," Cereza said. Alois squeezed her shoulder. "We have to give Luca a chance."

Ziva heard the second shot: a ripping howl, a spurt of blue fire from the deck of Lord Sabat's galleon, fired from one of those improbable sea-ork cannons. She glimpsed the man himself, massive and magnificent, his crimson greatcoat flaring around him as he shouted orders from the great ship's deck. The bolt winked; it fell, it struck the waves, it burst, a lashing eruption of spellfire hissing over the sea.

The Leviathan reared back from it, ponderous-slow, walls of water raining from its hide. Its jaws opened, and clashed back together. Ziva felt the reverberation in her guts, even as the Mistfox's sails rippled.

"We need to hit it where it hurts," Ziva urged Azare. "Get in one good blow from our best gun." She nodded at the bolt cannon at the Mistfox's bow, the twin fellfoxes that made up its firing mechanism limned in blue light. "We have bolts left-"

"And we'll keep those bolts until we need them." A wave dashed the ship's flank, and the entire vessel yawed hard to the side. Azare spun, facing the crew. "Keep her steady, or we'll all be fed to the waves!"

Ziva threw a glance back at the ruined city visible through the storm, its central tower jagged as a broken bone. Wherever Valere was out there, whatever mad scheme he had in store for stopping Sirin, she wished he'd bloody hurry it up.

"You!" she called to the witch-boy. He perched atop the rigging, his arms lifted, his face set. "Hold the winds!"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" he yelled back.

Ziva's breath hissed through her teeth as the Mistfox shuddered beneath her. She faced the monster, all her concentration focused on keeping the ship on top of the water.

The Leviathan reared again, heaving coil after coil of its bulk from the waves. It roared, and those jaws descended, open wide and hungry; it hit the waves, and the spellfire barrier. The swell thundered, a ridge of displaced water higher than the Mistfox's mast. It devoured another, smaller, ship off their port side, devoured it whole, leaving nothing in its wake. There was no time to rail, no time to mourn, before it was on them, too.

"Brace for impact!" Azare yelled, the crew scrambling for lines, for railings, for each other, hanging on. "Steady!"

Ice shattered off the Mistfox's bow, ripping gashes in the wood. An iceberg loomed to starboard; timbers split, and half the bowsprit vanished, scraped off as the ice slid past. Glowing spray lashed Ziva. Impact slammed her, nearly tearing her from the wheel. She clung on, her muscles screaming, her heels dug into the deck.

She felt Azare's hand grip her bicep, felt him hang onto her and Cereza and Alois alike, shielding them all from the force of the waves.

Lines twanged tight, sails straining at their moorings. The Mistfox tipped, then righted, rocking sickeningly from side to side as Ziva pulled herself and the others upright. She heard the witch-boy's cry of strain, half a hawk's call, half a child's scream, raw and anguished. Embers danced through the snow as the spellfire flared, and extinguished, smothered by the Leviathan's jaws.

"Severin," Ziva managed.

He looked pale, his eyes flickering as he searched the storm. "I know-"

"It needs more. It needs-"

"Wait for the next volley."

"Sir, we need to-"

"Wait," he urged. Blue light danced in his eyes. "Wait."

The next bolt came- Noor's ship, Ziva thought. As its light traced the clouds, she saw the Fishcutter illuminated, Captain Irene and her crew roped to the decks. One sail dangled, a flap of canvas torn ragged as a battle-wound.

Their bolt cannons smoked, ready for the next shot.

A pang lit Ziva's nerves. If the Leviathan came for them, next, they would end like Isabella Valere, like so many others, crushed and devoured, sunk to the black depths of this damned place. They would die, all of them- these reavers who had followed them here on a king's promise of peace, Cereza, who'd come in hopes of seeing her brother again, Azare, always Azare, who had believed in a better world, who had died for it. He would die again if they failed here- if she failed him- and this time there would be no resurrection. There would be nothing but storms and sleet, nothing but blood and ending, until the stars met the sea, until the end of the world.

Ending, she thought. Far from home.

She remembered Renard Irio's eyes, reflecting a glory of stars. She remembered his blood black on the deck, and the way he'd gone cold under her hands, how she'd tried and failed to hold his life in.

Death wouldn't rule her, not anymore, but it would come anyway, whether she railed against it or not.

The Fishcutter loosed her bolt cannons, and the Leviathan's waves rose at its command, walls of water crashing down, tearing the flames apart, extinguishing them too.

Lightning cracked. The Leviathan's roar sounded like triumph, sounded like victory. Ziva glimpsed its foreclaws unfurl, sheets of seawater sliding from their points. She glimpsed the ragged chunk taken from its neck by Isabella Valere's final strike, half-healed and still raw with blue godsblood.

Another spear of lightning lit the waves. Ziva saw it through a prism of tears; she was crying, damn her. She scrubbed her tears away with the back of her hand. Through the clouds drifted ragged shapes- shards of black, scattered and whirling on the winds. Maybe she'd gone mad, started seeing things, betrayed by her own sight.

"Azare," Cereza gasped, her eyes wide as she pointed for the skies.

"Bellana's mercy," he breathed.

She hadn't gone mad. Her eyes were hale. The shapes weren't shapes, but wings- vast, outstretched. The wind whipped through her hair, full of ice, spiraling around her and through the sails, filling but not straining them. The witch-boy atop the rigging laughed, his eyes wide, his wings unfurling from his shoulders as if in joy.

Witch wind, Ziva thought, and her heart pulsed against her ribs.

The witches swooped closer- a half-dozen of them, great black birds with elegant necks and golden eyes. Cereza laughed, her face lit with fierce joy. They strafed overhead, the tips of their wings dipping as they broke off, bringing a tide of winds with them. One, maybe, would never have been strong enough against the beast's command of the sky, but six of them-

Six, Ziva thought. Once she thought a single witch was an impossible sight, until she'd hunted one and chained one. Now here she stood, watching them fly, watching them together bend the storm to their command.

With a great crackle, a surge, a flare of light like noon, lightning sheared down from the clouds, sizzling off the waves. Steam billowed; the lightning struck, again, again, each of the Aiatar harnessing it, each of them working with the next, working together.

The lightning bent. It weaved, bolts arcing off one another, forming a great net of blinding, blue-white light around the monster.

Ziva jerked back as a bolt crackled past the Mistfox's mainmast, wreathing line and sail alike in spirit-fire.

"Where by all Saints did they come from?" shouted another Witchhunter.

"I don't bloody care," Ziva called back. "So long as they're with us."

The last of the witches turned, spinning on one wing, coming in fast toward them. The Witchhunters backed off as the witch dived, transforming on the wing, feathers cast off like curls of char as she dropped onto the deck.

She straightened. Her eyes lit on Cereza.

"Niive!" Cereza gasped.

She broke away from Azare and sprinted, flinging herself into the witch's arms. Niive buried her face in Cereza's shoulder; they were sobbing, both of them, clinging to one another. Niive's embrace was so tight it looked liable to crack bone.

"You came?" Niive managed. She set Cereza back, holding her face in her clawed hands. "You brought these pirates?"

"With a little persuasion. Looks like you made some friends, too."

"They're like me, Cereza." Her face split into a grin; she gave the other girl a swift kiss. "Aiatar. Young Aiatar-"

"There's more of you?" Alois stuttered.

Niive fixed him with a look. "Not all so nice as me, either."

Cereza gave her a little shake. "Where's Luca?"

"In the ruins. He has gone to find Sirin. To stop her."

"Alone?" Cereza said, her eyes wide.

"You three!" Azare yelled. "Hang on!"

The wheel trembled in Ziva's grip, her palms slick with sweat. Her stomach lurched as the ship's prow dipped, falling into the valley between two waves, then surging upward again toward the next wave's crest.

Niive lifted her hands; the sails belled, the men at the lines keeping the ship on its keel. Still Ziva felt the drag of water against the hull, the way the Mistfox fought the currents. It didn't matter how kind the winds were, how well the two witches commanded them. There was only so much a ship could take before it gave out at the seams.

Ziva glanced to Azare. He faced the storm, his elegant profile cut clean against the dark water. Ziva remembered another storm, another monster- a god at their mercy, a god in flames. The clouds broke open as lightning crackled over the Leviathan's body, as it thrashed and howled against another onslaught of spellfire loosed from Lord Sabat's cannons.

For a moment, Ziva thought the lightning net would be enough; a laugh of triumph caught in her throat as its talons tangled in the lightning, as it curled off its glistening black hide, as it broke through, shattering the net in its next wave of sleet.

Its claws sheared down.

Sabat's ship vanished, consumed by the waves.

One of the Aiatar above broke formation and dived after them, out of sight as the lightning crackled into nothingness, the storm's darkness rolling in.

"Azare," Ziva said. "What do we do?"

"I..." He shook his heads. "Saints, I don't know."

The stars were out. They shone in the water as in the sky, all things meeting, all become one. Like your star sea, Pa, Ziva thought, and felt her heart shiver and crack.

Ending, far from home.

Maybe Ren had read her true after all.

Cereza pressed her hands to her mouth as the Leviathan tore its way through Sabat's spellfire, as the waves surged around it, carrying it closer to Rashavir. It shook off the remnants of spellfire, wounds glistening along its flanks and streaking its jaws. Its blood gouted into the water, endless rivers of that unearthly blue light.

Its blue-gold eyes shone through the storm, focused on the ruins.

The storm was pulled with it, the star sea heaving from beneath. The Mistfox rode the swell, the water glassing beneath it. Off their port side Ziva caught sight of the Fishcutter, ragged but floating, sails filled by one of the witches.

Close, Ziva thought. With a strong rower, one of their longboats might make it.

She turned to Azare. "How fast can you get the crew off the ship and into the longboat?"

"Fast." The wheel jerked in Ziva's grip; Azare took a peg and held it steady again. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that monster will tear us apart. All of us."

"You'd abandon ship?"

"And kiss the beast goodbye as we do."

His dark eyes searched hers. His soaked hair shone in the god's light. Blue radiance touched the planes of his face, the lines at the corners of his eyes, so beloved to her for so long. She reached forward and pressed her palm to his heart, just over the wound she'd made. She felt its steady pulse. He trusted her, she knew. Even now, he trusted her to the end.

"We have two left, Severin," she said. "Two of Daval's star iron javelins. That's all it took last time. Not to kill it. Just to keep it occupied."

She gave the wheel a slap. "I'll keep your girl steady for you, fire off a shot, and then follow."

"Ziva-"

She pressed a finger to his lips, then brushed her thumb over his face, tracing its lines, its scars. "Go," she told him. "I'll be there. You won't even miss me."

He took her hand and held it, hard and fast, in his own.

"I love you," he said.

Ziva's throat clenched. "Hurry," she told him. When he let go Ziva felt it like a stab to her own heart, like a thing torn away.

"You heard her," Azare shouted to the crew. "Ready a longboat!"

Ziva hoisted a coil of rope and set about lashing the wheel to the mast. Alois rounded the deck, pulling the wounded to their feet, helping the crew into the longboat; it hung over the side by stout ropes, creaking in the wind. Cereza gave her a glance as she climbed in after Niive; the witch's eyes were closed, her face set in concentration as she kept the Mistfox steady with her winds, helping Ziva to the last moment she could.

Azare was the last to board. He stood in the longboat, hanging onto its side, as Ziva finished tying off the wheel.

"Lapin," he called. "Load the cannon and we'll be off."

"I'm coming." She gave the knot a last yank, then went to him. The longboat creaked at its moorings. Azare held out his arms over the gap between it and the Mistfox, the sea visible beneath. Ziva paused, breathing hard, her face numb from the spray.

She glanced upward and met the witch-boy's eyes. He stared down at her from the rigging, his brow furrowed.

"Ziva," Azare said. "Hurry."

"I wish I could have seen it," Ziva said.

"What?"

"Estara," Ziva said. "The nation it could be. The nation it will be. I wish I could see things like you. Maybe I could have, eventually."

She caught his face in her palm, her other hand moving to her leg, to the plain knife sheathed there. "Guess we won't find out."

She drew her knife, and with one clean cut, slashed the lines loose.

Azare was ripped away with the longboat. It crashed to the waves and spun on the currents, flung backward, toward the Fishcutter. Ziva glimpsed Azare's look of horror, his hand reaching for her, before she pushed herself from the railing, her heart pounding, heat filling her eyes, and toward the hatch belowdecks.

"Keep her steady!" she yelled to the witch-boy.

There was no time for sorrow, no time for thought. No time to contemplate what might have been. She flung the hatch wide and sprinted into creaking darkness.

The waves against the Mistfox's hull pounded like her pulse, hard as drumbeats; she scrambled down the tilting corridors, pulling herself along half-blind. Glass littered the floors from the shattered hall lamps, sliding like a deadly carpet as the ship was hurled on the swell. With the wheel lashed the way it was, their course was set toward the monster. She felt rather than heard it bellow; it was a sound bigger than her, shaking her to her guts.

"Think that scares me?" Ziva snarled. Her ankle turned, and she fell, hard, to her hands and knees. She scrambled to her feet again, heat spreading under her clothes. She must have cut herself. "I've heard worse than you. Killed worse than you."

She kicked open the hatch to the hold and hoisted herself down, landing in knee-deep seawater. It numbed her instantly. She sloshed through, the darkness a shifting gloom around her. Crates floated by, torn loose from their lashings; her fingers raked out, searching for a metal surface. She knew this place better than anywhere. It had to be here. It had to be-

It was. Her fingers brushed the surface of the javelin case. She fumbled it open and touched smooth, cool metal. It hummed under her fingertips, living, waiting, tense with power.

An inferno in each shot, she thought. We'll see how you like this, monster. I'll wager you'll remember the taste.

There was no time for caution, not now. She hoisted the javelins from their settings and over her shoulders, holding them like harpoons. The ship tilted around her as she fought her way from the hold and back onto the deck. The wind felt like a colossal hand set on flinging her into the sea. It glowed now to its depths, rich with godsblood.

Motes swirled in the currents, like billowing runs of some unknown creature, ever-shifting, ever-changing, molten and strange. Its light touched her scarred, glass-cut hands, turning her blood black, turning her filthy skin clean and new again.

"Isabella Valere died carving that cut in your neck," she snarled between her teeth as she reached the bolt cannon. "I'm no queen, but I fancy ending like one. What do you think?"

She slammed her knee into the cannon's crank; with the grind of gears it swiveled down, fellfoxes parting, slot opening. She fed the first javelin between the fellfoxes' teeth and cranked the mechanism home again, aiming not for the monster, but for the sea in its path.

There- a crust of a seawall jutted above the waves, some distance offshore. That would do nicely.

She remembered Azare's face, the warmth of his hands. She remembered her father's stories, her mother's paintings, the hymns she sang while she worked. She remembered Hana, her sister, the first of them to die. She remembered dust, and dreaming.

The endless stars above them.

"But we don't always get what we want," she said. "Do we?"

She cranked the cannon round. The javelin point swung. The wind-speed, the distance- all made an easy tally. High above, the witch-boy lifted his hands. The winds tightened to a scream, swirling around the bolt's head, clearing the way through the storm.

It would sail true.

"Gnaw on this, beastie," she whispered, and let it fly.

An arc. A howl, the spit of blue flames.

Silence, and then-

The sea erupted into spellfire. It flung aside all shadows. The wall went up, stone and waves alike, spilling burning matter into the sea. The Leviathan shrieked and recoiled, hurling itself backward to avoid the spellfire's searing touch.

Ziva was already on her feet, already cranking the bolt cannon down toward her, slotting the second bolt into place. Her hands slipped on the crank- blood-slick this time, and shaking, so badly she could scarce grip it again.

"Saints-" she swore.

Shadow fell across her, swamping the whole Mistfox. Ziva looked up. The Leviathan's foreclaw rose above her; seawater rained over the deck. The witch-boy flung himself into the sky, gone in a wingbeat. The rigging cracked and snapped under the force, canvas tearing, sails ripping down their length. The hull groaned, then squealed; the currents rushed around the ship, their strength unbearable.

It couldn't bear it. The Leviathan was too strong.

"Saints," Ziva snarled again.

It wouldn't win. It was strong, but she was stronger. She flung herself toward the bolt cannon again. Her hands slipped around its crank.

The Leviathan's claw came down, hard, talons shearing through the water, through the Mistfox. The deck broke. She felt it in her bones as the ship was split in half and flung in the same ferocious blow.

She was weightless. Like sinking, she thought, or flying.

Red crushed into her vision, then white, and then nothing.

***

Seabirds.

Starlight.

Wingbeats? Wind flitted through her hair, cool and soft. Maybe she really was flying.

***

She felt it on her face like touch. Or was it touch? Ziva wasn't sure. The world was a haze. She saw it past her lashes. Something else, too.

Someone.

He said her name again. She knew that voice. She tried to reach for Azare, but her hand wouldn't obey her. She couldn't feel it. She couldn't feel herself. She would have thought she was dead, but death wasn't supposed to hurt so much. It was meant to be light, and Bellana's hands, and all things made clear. What a grand bloody lie that turned out to be.

"Ziva," Azare murmured. Her vision focused. She saw him, and Cereza weeping at his side. Alois stood bloodied and pale, and the witch-boy, skinny, silent, stared down at her. She registered their surroundings. The Fishcutter creaked on the swells; they were on an ice floe, one of many cast adrift on the sea. Maybe that was why she was so damned cold.

Snow kissed her face, numbing her skin. She drew breath, and a sharp pain lanced her lung. "Severin," she whispered.

"Hush, now," he told her. He stroked her hair. His lashes were wet. "Just stay where you are, Ziva."

"Is...is that an order, sir?"

"You'd defy it if it was, wouldn't you?"

"You're crying."

"I am," he confessed.

"Don't," Ziva told him. "Please don't."

Her body was dead weight. She must have been banged up something fierce when the Mistfox broke apart.

She searched Azare's face. "Did I sprain something?" she asked him.

"Just a little."

"Nothing a bit of rest can't fix."

He gave her a shaking smile. "You've never rested a day in your life, Lapin..."

"I don't know, sir. Might give it a try."

A shout came from over Azare's shoulder. Ziva glimpsed Atana running toward them, and tried to turn her head, but her vision swam.

"You're going to be all right," Azare told her. "The witch saved you from the waves. He got to you just in time."

His voice sounded far away. No, Ziva thought. Stay. You're finally right where I want you.

"Don't lie to me," she murmured.

"Ziva-" His voice crumpled, her name echoing in her head. Ziva, Ziva.

"I. I tried. Couldn't keep the Mistfox steady. Lost her. Sorry." Her vision swam again, darkness creeping in at the edges. "Lost so much. Should have told you a long time ago. It's all gone now. Doesn't matter anymore."

"Ziva, listen to me. Listen, and live."

I can't, she wanted to say, but her strength was gone.

Her eyes drifted shut. She felt him grip her hands, her face. Let me go, Azare, she thought, but he didn't. He didn't. She felt something cold and smooth press against her lower lip, and then, without warning-

Water.

It slid into her mouth. She almost gagged- it was bitter as blood, and warm. Too warm. The warmth breathed, it arced like lightning. A rush, like wind, like the coming dawn. It suffused her, it filled her, it lit her veins behind her closed eyes.

The heat flooded through her body and with it came pain. She heard a series of cracks like gunshots, felt her bones shift inside her, felt the pain slide free from her lungs, felt the precise moment when she could breathe again.

Air rushed in, and Ziva's eyes sprang open. She raked a deep breath, so cold it bit, so sweet it brought tears to her eyes. She pitched to her side and hacked. Blood spattered the ice, and water, glowing water, iridescent as whaleglass.

Not just the water. She was glowing. Her skin shone, lit from within, lifting her hair and illuminating each strand as if by moonslight, pooling over the snow, filling the darkness with its radiance. She stared down at herself, her shaking hands, and watched as the gashes sealed over, the skin drawn back together, made whole again.

Within moments, nothing was left but faint, silvery scars. The glow fell away, rippling into nothingness with the falling snow. Her hair settled around her head. The pain inside her, once unbearable, faded to a murmur.

She looked up. Azare looked back at her, ragged and bloodied, wide-eyed and weeping, holding the Belmont cup.

"You healed me," she managed.

"Ziva-" he said.

"You healed me," Ziva said again, and reached for him, and dragged him to her, her arm hooked around his neck, her face pressed to his cheek. He pulled her in, holding on; she felt his heartbeat, and her own. She felt the lingering warmth of the healing water, and of her own tears. Her heart broke open, and it didn't matter anymore. She let the pain come, and the rending love, and yet she could take it.

She and Azare drew apart. His hand cupped her cheek, his thumb stroking her mouth, his eyes on her, full of relief.

One heartbeat came after the next. Ziva kept her hold on him, kept him on his knees with her, the two of them dirty and soaked, shivering in the snow.

"Thought...thought I was supposed to watch your back," Ziva managed, after a while.

"You were flagging, Lapin. Fancied I'd give you a breather."

Ziva nudged her forehead to his cheek. "Where's the Leviathan?"

She followed Azare's look toward the sea. The Aiatar circled overhead, far enough away she might have mistaken them for cloud gulls if she didn't know better. Spellfire guttered amidst the waves. The beast had almost reached Rashavir; its ridged back shone as it surfaced, glistening with moonslight.

A thrum passed through the ice, like a skipped heartbeat. As Ziva watched, the moonslight dimmed. She looked up, and felt her hands curl into fists. Darkness edged the moons, leaching inward, devouring them piece by piece.

No eclipse, this. That was Sirin's work.

"Come on, Luca," Cereza whispered.

Ziva sent a silent prayer of her own toward the dead city, toward Luca Valere somewhere at its heart. It wasn't to any of his gods, but she didn't suppose he would much mind. He'd need all the help he could get.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 44- Luca

***

One of their guards yanked the fur hood roughly from Luca's head. He spat out hairs and squinted, his eyes readjusting to the light.

Claws dug into his cheek, and one of the Aiatar spat a stream of witch-speak at him.

"I told you," Luca sputtered. "I don't understand."

"She asks if I am your slave," Niive rasped from somewhere nearby.

"Tell her bloody no," Luca said.

"I have." Her voice was weak and dry. "They do not believe me."

The Aiatar gave a low snarl, then turned. Luca winced, but her claws barely grazed his skin. He hung from his bonds, forcing his breathing to slow.

The passageway was dark, the only light a faint phosphorescence veining through the icy walls. In it, Luca could make out the Aiatar. All of them were, under their masks- golden eyes and strange, elongated features, sharp fangs and fingers stained black to the knuckle, tipped with the beginnings of claws.

It was the second time they'd stopped, but they'd driven him and Niive for hours upon hours. The Aiatar had given him no indication of where they were headed. They had marched for what felt like miles through these tunnels. Luca guessed from the slick, weeping walls that they'd traveled through the sea-ice itself, avoiding storms and ice tortoises alike, but for the past few thousand steps the hiss of footfalls against ice had transitioned to the crunch of stone. Now the tunnel walls were black rock, glistening and reflective. Like An Gholam's walls, like the Aiatar temple on the Leviathan's island. Not stone, but the petrified flesh of a dead Leviathan.

His heart raced. They were close to Rashavir. Close to Sirin.

Luca's body ached, his shoulder most of all, the injury jarred by each step and only growing worse. It didn't help that his wrists were tied with some kind of sinew, cutting into his skin, tighter now than they had been before. He searched the dark for Niive. She lay on a makeshift stretcher, nested in furs, her limbs sprawled at her sides.

Blood soaked the furs black and slick. Luca tensed to move to her, fear clenching his lungs, but his guard yanked him back.

"Let me see her," Luca said.

She stared down at him, unmoved. The first Aiatar, the one with the cropped hair, thrust a waterskin at Luca and hissed a word.

"Drink," Niive translated.

"You think I'm making some ploy to escape? Let me go to her," Luca said. "She's not about to get better. She needs treatment. Do you understand me?"

The Aiatar hissed the word again. Drink.

There was no point in resisting. Luca sipped at the water, the Aiatar tipping it carefully into his mouth before withdrawing the skin. Luca noticed he had the knife Cereza had given him, belted at his side. The Aiatar went to Niive next, who stared up at him with narrowed eyes. The two seemed to regard each other for a moment before the Aiatar turned and rejoined his companions.

Niive bent her head, her hair shrouding her face again. Her breathing was a tight hiss, pained and awful.

"Niive," Luca whispered. "How do you-"

"Do not make me speak more than I must."

"I'm...I'm sorry."

Her eyes flicked to his. "Seeing you bound like that is enough recompense for me."

Luca managed a weak smile. "Glad you approve," he said. "I'm so bloody cold I can barely feel my bits."

"The last thing I want to hear of is your-" Her lips pursed. "Your bits."

"You must be feeling better. Takes effort to sound that sour."

She hissed a laugh, but her face twisted with pain, and it turned to a cough. "Hold on, Niive," Luca whispered.

Hold on, Sirin.

One of the Aiatar dragged him roughly to his feet and shoved him ahead with a harsh word. They didn't hood him again, and it chilled him. If they were willing for him to see from this point onward, they were either planning on trusting him, or killing him.

Wherever this point onward is, Luca thought, trudging ahead over icy, uneven ground.

They traveled through vaults, and caverns, through vast subterranean halls half-ruined with ice, through places so dark and echoing Luca forgot the feeling of his body, of any other place than this. He felt like a thing suspended underwater, in some trench deep under the sea, far from even a distant dream of sunlight.

The Aiatar seemed to know their path cold, heading ever forward at a relentless pace, Luca struggling to keep up despite the cold and the ache in his body weighing him down. After hours or days, the tunnel tightened around them, and began to slope upward. Luca felt steps under his boots, and stumbled up them, his teeth grit as his muscles screamed in protest. Wind licked his face, icy and so sharp he flinched. He searched the darkness ahead. It was tinged with blue.

Light.

It strengthened as Luca ascended, cutting sharp the fur-bundled silhouettes of the Aiatar, falling across Niive in her makeshift sling. They moved through the remnants of a massive doorway arch, high enough for a ship to pass through and not lose its flag. It was flanked by twin beasts, smaller cousins of the stone monster they had encountered in the depths of An Gholam. Their eyes gleamed, set with chunks of whaleglass.

Without warning, the tunnel opened around them, becoming not cavern walls but a carved stone parapet, open to the sky.

The sky. It churned, windswept and caught with spears of prismatic light. An aurora, Luca thought as he watched the shifting colors, the hanging curtains of light, as if suspended from the vault of the sky. He heard their whisper over the sound of the storm, their eldritch whalesong cry, crystalline and eerie. Colors shot through the clouds like flames: pale green and scarlet and summer-blue, snow flurries caught in them like stars. The full moons shone, impossibly, the triplets drenching Luca in their dense light.

But it wasn't the aurora that stole his senses, that brought him to a halt. He forgot his bound hands and his guards. He forgot to breathe.

The rich moonslight spilled down the parapet, down cliffside, over Rashavir.

The Sunken Ruins. A snow-lashed expanse of broken towers, broken pillars, grand walls and bastion fortresses and high, thin spires like knives of black stone. Luca could make out its foundations, and felt a pang at the sight: a vast form, a humped ridge. Not an island, but a body, dead and turned to stone.

They stood at its outskirts, in one of the bastion fortresses. In its center, built on the upper curve of the dead Leviathan's back, stood the looming shadow of a single tower, impossibly huge. Once, Luca saw, it must have near scraped the sky. Now it stood broken like the rest, its heights shattered, the entire structure listing hard to one side.

Queen Mazarin's stronghold? Luca wondered. Surely only a winged creature had the means to make it to those dizzying heights. Once, the wingbeats of Aiatar must have pulsed at the air, vast black birds circling the tower like shadows shaken to the wind. A city of magic, and knowledge, of research and alchemy, the dreams of a great empire all gathered within its boundary seawalls. Now there was nothing- no life, no movement, nothing but the keening wind and the aurora's song.

He could see where the tower had begun to crumble, a ragged bite taken from one of the buttresses near its base. Even so, it would have loomed over Valeris, would have drowned the whole of his home city in shadow. All had crumbled, rings of seawalls shattered, letting in the waves. Sea hissed through the ruins, flooding them in rhythmic rushes of the tide.

Rashavir, one-time citadel of the Aiatar empire, now sunken and dead. The heart of the world, where the Leviathan had first died and was reborn, if Valeria had told him true. Now that he was seeing it, Luca was inclined to believe her twice over. This was what power made. This was how it died. He was looking at its corpse- a land of ghosts, scraped-out and hollow. It felt empty as anything he had ever known.

I've seen this place before, he realized. The Leviathan had shown it to him as it died- a city of black stone entombed in ice, and deep inside: a heartbeat. Not gone, but sleeping. Not dead, not as long as there was a spark left.

His own heartbeat was swift and unsteady inside him.

One of the Aiatar shoved him forward, tearing his eyes from ruined Rashavir. "We don't have time," he begged. Niive stirred in her sling. "Sirin's down there somewhere-"

Another shove made him bite off his words.

A second archway swallowed them up, its beasts broken and headless. Past them, a sweep of broad steps curved off into shadow. The walls were carved with creatures and constellations, unfamiliar to Luca. The stone was iridescent black, reflective as glass. Luca glimpsed his blurred reflection in it as the Aiatar advanced, heading up the steps.

Toward her, Luca thought. His heart pounded. Did they mean Sirin? Is she here already? Is she waiting? The thought gave him strength, even as the steps blurred in his vision. He was gasping for breath by the time they reached and a pair of doors, each carved in the form of a folded wing, feathers crusted with ice.

The Aiatar with the shaved head pounded his fist against the door, then nodded to his companions and pushed it wide.

Amber light spilled from the room within. Its source was a brazier, Luca saw, a broad bronze bowl set on a stand and filled with coals and dried herbs. Fragrant smoke coiled in ribbons through the broken half-dome of the ceiling. Firelight filled the dome, illuminating what must have once been a glory of constellations set with whaleglass, glittering like true stars in the hazy gloom.

An orrery, or the remains of one. A vast, complex system of arcs, and gears, and machinery ornate as the armor of insects was housed in the dome, suspended within a gilt globe, revolving silently in and out of columns of falling snow.

How long have they been living here? There was no way that hadn't been maintained over the past millennia; some parts looked newer, others scattered over the room as if waiting to be fixed in place. Luca ducked as a great bronze arm swung overhead, the great moon drifting in midair over the arm's point, wrought from what looked like stained glass and lit, softly, from within. He watched it rotate out of sight, carried by that perfect suspension.

The Aiatar filed in, shedding their masks. The pair carrying Niive brushed past. She lay with eyes shut and lips parted, unmoving.

"Niive," Luca gasped. "Triune, can't you see she's dying-"

Pain cracked into the side of his face as his captor backhanded him. He reeled from the blow, falling against the icy wall.

"Help her," he managed, rounding on the Aiatar. He stared down, eyes narrowed, lip curled back from his sharp teeth. "All Hells, she's one of you-"

The Aiatar snarled and lifted his hand, fingertips lengthening into claws. Luca flinched, bracing for pain.

It never came. The Aiatar's hand froze in midair, tendons standing against his skin.

"Kyosi," said a dry old voice from the shadows. "Enough, lad."

Luca breathed hard, staring. The orrery revolved; two of its great bronze arcs parted, and between them, from a veil of herbed smoke, came an old woman. She lowered her gnarled hand and Kyosi crumpled, breathing hard. The woman stood hunched in layers of ragged shawls and embroidered furs, her salt-white hair caught in long, fraying braids, her face a map of wrinkles and fading indigo tattoos. Her eyes were gold.

Luca looked her over again. That wasn't a hunch under her shawls. It was her furled wings, feathers dull and spackled in white as if age had begun to bleach them out. Luca stared as as she moved closer, the other Aiatar drawing back with heads bowed.

The old woman came to a halt, peering up at him with those luminous eyes.

"She brought you here?" she asked, her accent harsh on the words. She spoke in antique Lapidaean, like Valeria. "She is not your thrall?"

"She's my friend. She's dying-"

"Your friend." She barked a laugh, raucous as a gull's mew. "Islanders lie. We all know this. You're an obstinate thing, I admit, to not be drowned or devoured. Usually the tortoises get anyone fool enough to sail past the ice. Who are you, boy, to creep so close?"

"My name is Luca Valere-"

The old woman clenched her hand. Luca snapped rigid; he fell hard to his knees. The woman crooked her finger. The force seized Luca again; his head tipped up, baring his throat.

His pulse hammered against his ribs as she pressed her claws deep into the soft skin of his neck.

"You made it past the seas, little Valere," the old woman said. Her eyes were wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks. The air around her burned with power. "No further. Maybe I take your teeth to string on sinew, your knuckles to scry with, your eyes to shine like stars at my throat. You should have stayed safe in your world."

"Triune," Luca gasped. "You're her. You're Tuija."

Her power left him. He pitched forward and gasped for breath. When he lifted his head she still stared at him, the other Aiatar a circle of claws and spears and bared teeth. Luca struggled to his knees, his hands lifted.

"You're Tuija," he repeated, staring at her, taking her in.

She must have been thousands of years old, older than the Sundered Empire, older than Lapide itself. He couldn't help but laugh, soft and flush with wonder. His head spun. Maybe Kyosi had hit him harder than he thought.

"You were her, weren't you?" Luca said. "Valeria's consort."

"Consort." Tuija hissed, lifting her chin. "And a pretty word that is, Valere. But I can't deny you- I might as well have been. She treated me as such in the end. I won her wars for her. I kept her alive through wounds that should have meant the death of her."

One of the arcs of the orrery drifted past. Tuija brushed a claw down its bronze arc, the look in her eyes, for a moment, faraway.

"I would have gone to that death with her, if that had been the way of things," she murmured. She lifted her claw from the bronze as it swung into its upward arc, out of her reach.

"And what did she intend for me in return?" she went on. "The coward's way out. To give up, and languish, when she grew too tired and bitter to right her mistakes."

Luca narrowed his eyes. "And, tell me, what is it you're doing now?"

"Why should I not kill you where you kneel?" Tuija spat.

"Why didn't you when you had the chance?" He shook his head. "This is useless. Niive's dying. Let me help her-"

"If you're Valeria's whelp you have no place here. Leave, or die." She half-turned toward the brazier, gathering her shawls around her. "You choose."

Luca awkwardly reached in his pocket with his bound hands. Whaleglass flashed in the firelight. The crystal shard skittered over the tiles.

"That's your hair, isn't it?" Luca said.

Tuija looked back at him. She turned, and knelt, and took the shard of whaleglass, cupping it in her palms.

"She hung it over her tomb," Luca said. "She loved you. She loved you to the end. She might have failed you, Tuija, but she didn't fail me."

Tuija stared at him. The whaleglass sparked in her palm, reflecting in her eyes.

"I already made my choice," Luca said. "Your turn."

One hand curled over the whaleglass shard. She raised the other, claws hooked and sharp as the black glass of the walls. Luca braced, waiting for pain, waiting for those talons to enter his flesh, whatever came. He didn't break his gaze from Tuija's. Neither did she, steady and unblinking, her eyes shining in the firelight.

She slashed a claw through the air. Luca's bonds snapped. He clenched his teeth as blood rushed back to his wrists and shoulders.

"Then I choose," Tuija said.

She paced to Niive, then knelt, and pressed her hand to the wound. Her eyes slid shut; her lips fluttered. The whaleglass pulsed in her hand: a flare of a glow, then dark again.

Niive stirred. A flush passed through her skin. Prismatic light rippled, veins flashing with whaleglass colors. Her hand flexed, and her head turned. She opened her eyes. They were bleary, but bright, free of pain. Alive.

"Valere?" she rasped, focusing on Luca.

He let out a laugh of pure relief. "I'm here, Niive."

Her eyes slid shut again, but it was into sleep, not death. Tuija withdrew her hand and passed it over Niive's closed eyes. She touched her cheek, softly.

"Who are these strangers, Tuija?" Kyosi said, in the same heavily-accented Lapidaean she had used.

Luca arched his eyebrows. "So you can understand me."

Kyosi cut him a look. "I don't consort with islanders."

"Give it time," Luca told him. "I tend to grow on most people."

"Forgive them," Tuija said, straightening from Niive's side. "They are young, and have had nothing of your kind but pain."

She nodded to each in turn. "Shot down, or captured, or caged, chained like figureheads to the bows of great ships the world over. I found them, and freed them, and brought them here, where they might be safe. Might be hidden. Might be free."

"I'm sorry," Luca said. "I...I know I have no right to come here or to ask you anything. Any of you," he added, glancing at the other Aiatar. "But something is coming. Someone-"

"I felt the Leviathan die, Valere. I felt it sunder. I feel it now." She went to the brazier and drew a long breath of the smoke. "And I feel her."

"Sirin." Luca scrambled to his feet and moved toward her, his heart pounding. Kyosi made to stop him, but Tuija waved him off. "She wants the monster. She wants its power. To become it...to end herself-"

He shook his head, his throat tight. "She can't."

Tuija's eyes reflected the coals. "For me all things have ended, Valere. I would have been queen of this place. Queen of all the moonslight touched. Queen of all things."

She lifted her head, and Luca saw through the years as if through clear water- her strong profile, her white hair like a crown. The daughter of High Queen Mazarin, witch-queen, heir to her mother's sorcery, and to her butchery.

She let out her breath, and just as fast, the illusion was gone. "Now look at it."

"Then let me go," Luca urged.

She shook her head. "It's done, lad. I've seen folk sunk down deep in power. The Leviathan is sundered. Your friend is gone."

"I won't accept that."

"Then you're a fool."

"Maybe I am," Luca snarled. "Better a fool than what you've become, a bitter old woman hiding yourself away."

Tuija's wings stirred, lifting above her shoulders and doubling her height. Her teeth seemed sharper as she bared them. "I paid my dues. I made your world, boy. And you broke it."

"So let me fix it. It needn't stay broken. That's what Valeria decided, at the end. The last decision she ever made. Against all odds, she hoped. Can't you trust that now?"

Tuija's eyes shone. She gripped the whaleglass pendant in her fist so hard her hand quivered. She might have rebuilt Mazarin's world, might have roped it to her command and ruled. Instead, she'd burned it. And what was left? The sunken city, these ruins in the ice. Another chance for the world to get it right, to be better than what had come before.  

"Foolish to hope," she murmured.

"And you're a fool with me. All of them-" He gestured to the other Aiatar. "They're hope too, aren't they? That your people can be more than slave-mongers and nightmares, cruel gods and blood queens. That you can live in this world and not bleed it dry. That all of us can. "

He advanced on her, hands lifted, palms open. "You might claim to be done with it, but you're not. I see that. There's still that fire in you. Let me go, and it won't have been for nothing-"

"Tuija!"

One of the other Aiatar, a young girl with twin braids falling down her shoulders, stood at an arched window. A lookout.

She spoke a rapid stream of witch-tongue.

"Something is happening," Tuija translated.

Luca faced the window. Across the expanse of crashing waves and iron sea, across the ruined spires of Rashavir, shadow erupted like flames: a great blossoming void, a storm of darkness. Wind struck Luca, full of ice and bitter with magic; he grabbed hold as he felt the entire orrery tower shift and grind beneath him.

Not just the orrery, he saw, but the entire city. Waves broke, rising, licking the base of the ruined tower. The darkness was a roiling mass; as he watched, it expanded outward, tendrils licking walls, bringing them crumbling down.

She was here.

Blue light flickered on the horizon.

"Sirin," he whispered, as if she could hear him.

With another gust of bitter wind, the darkness pulsed outward. It seemed to revolve around a central point, like a hurricane; Sirin must be at its eye. Luca's mind scrambled for a solution, for some clever trick or back door, but all ways out seemed closed to him, doors crumbled, bridges fallen.

The blue light on the horizon brightened. It became lightning, it became a second storm, it became a swell parting the sea, limned in summer-blue, a dark ever-shifting mass, swimming closer, coming for her.

Luca stared, numb. He barely felt the howling wind, the ice fragments needling his exposed skin. Cold settled into his heart, final as a blow, final as a blade.

The Leviathan was here.

He was too late.

He closed his eyes. He couldn't watch what came next. He couldn't watch her die.

Orange flared through his eyelids, vivid as the dawn.

Witch-speak broke out around him- the Aiatar, commands shouted. Wings stirred the wind. Luca's eyes sprang open, icy tears streaking his face. Impossibly, it was there- fire, true fire, a great rolling wave of it, wreathing a ship. It was small as an insect compared to the approaching Leviathan, but as Luca searched the waves he saw more ships, dozens of them, sailing through the sea-ice, aimed to intercept the Leviathan's path toward Sirin.

His breath caught in his throat. Was one the Fishcutter? The Mistfox? Had they united the pirate lords at last?

As he watched, a burst of blue shot from the deck of the leading ship: an alchemic bolt. It arced. It fell, and spellfire caught, a swathe of waves at once aflame. The Leviathan bellowed, forelimbs churning, rearing back before it met the fire.

Keeping it at bay.

Luca's heart pounded. He felt it, rising inside him- a rush of wonder like the moonslight. He felt again the driving wind, the pain in his shoulder, the furious pulse of blood through him. He was alive. He was still breathing. Hope wasn't gone, not as long as there was a spark of it left. He still had a chance.

He wasn't too late.

Not yet.

The Aiatar bristled around him, spears and claws and wings spread. Tuija whirled toward him and wound her hand into the front of his coat, jerking him down to her level.

"You brought them?" she snarled.

"No. They came on their own, all of them, every one, because they believed there was a chance." Luca met her hawk gaze. "Do you feel the same?"

She stared at him, then let him go.

"All of you!" she shouted. "Down to the ships." Tuija went to the girl at the window and touched her cheek, then faced a younger boy, his yellow eyes wide and nervous. She pulled him to his feet. "Take the winds, take the lightning, and help them. You hear me?"

"They are...islanders," the girl at the window said, twisting her long braids. The other young Aiatar gathered around her, hugging arms over stomachs, feathers rustling as if from nerves. "You told us-"

"Damn what I told you," Tuija said. "Cast it to the howling night. You have your own minds, and your own hearts. I am older than all of you fledglings put together, and I can still be shifted by an islander stripling like this moons-mad Valere. So if you want to be like me, you keep your hearts, and you fight."

She faced her charges down, her head held high, her wings lifted. "Do not hide your hope, like I did. Go. Remember what I taught you. Keep the beast back."

"Tuija-" Kyosi protested.

"And you," Tuija said, clicking her fingers at him. "Take the lad down. Get him as close as you can to that storm of shadows."

"Thank you," Luca breathed.

Tuija looked at him, and nodded, once.

Luca went to Kyosi. The Aiatar gave him a quick once-over, then jerked his head toward the half-crumbled dome and the sky gaping beyond. "Hope you don't mind a rough flight, Valere."

"So long as we make it."

"Then we had best hurry."

"Good." He paused, then pointed to his dagger, hanging from Kyosi's belt. "Now give me the knife."

[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 42- Sirin

***

She'd been walking a long time. Days, she thought, though it could have been mere hours. She was sunk too far deep in herself to know for sure.

The sea-ice seemed a living thing, in constant movement from the ocean's whims. It shifted and groaned around her, chasms opening, snarling with froth and icy spray as if to swallow her down before they clashed shut again, the boom of impact shaking her to the bones. Sirin felt them through her shadows, the tell-tale tremor of one about to split. She felt them, treacherous and hungry, and moved past them like a sleepwalker.

She felt too the distant ache of her feet, registered the bloody footprints stretching behind her, the dead numbness of her hands as she clutched Puppy to her chest, but the power was stronger than pain or exhaustion. It was stronger than the sea and this endless ice. It couldn't hurt her.

You're so close, she told herself. Just keep walking.

"Just keep walking, Sirin." Her grandmother's voice swam from the ever-shifting darkness, swathing her like her own small storm. "It's all well, my girl. We're waiting for you."

Waiting for you, all waiting, all still alive.

Again, again.

All will be forgiven, Sirin. Just you wait.

She clenched Puppy's fur hard in her hands. The creature whined softly, head still pressed to the curve of her throat.

I know you're scared, she told it. I know. You won't have to be for much longer.

She had been afraid for so long.

Not when she was dying. The knife had opened her throat, and she'd channeled all her concentration into the pain, flaring after a skipped heartbeat: a flood-rush, so much her mind could not handle it. She almost lost consciousness. She choked on her own blood, salty as the sea and warm, but her hands were cold, the rest of her so cold.

The slavers had thrown her in their skiff and taken her to their ship, and then she was in the dark of the hold, surrounded by other children. They were holding hands, chains making a circle around her. Someone held her hand, too, even though it was sticky with blood. Her other was clamped to her throat.

She was alive. How was she alive?

Sirin had tried to speak, but all that had emerged was a gurgle, then nothing. She gasped for breath. She was weak as a newborn bird, her hands quivering, bones pressing sharp against her skin. The other children hushed her with whispers.

"They thought you were going to die," a little boy said. "They...they were going to bleed you, I think. Witchborn blood fetches a fine price, they said."

"What do they want?" another boy wailed.

"Hush, now," said a girl, Kestrel, a little older than Sirin. She clutched the boy to her chest, stroking his shorn hair with bloody fingers. She'd been the one to hold Sirin's hand.

"We'll stay together, won't we?" the smaller boy said, his sobs subsiding to sniffles. He scrubbed his face with a grimy hand. They all still wore their woolen capes and sealskin parkas. They all still wore the black sand of the beach, or ashes, or blood. All their hair was gone, braids sliced away at the root. The slavers hadn't been careful, either; open gashes glistened on scalps.

Sirin felt the sting of her own abraded scalp and the pain gripped her, crushing her lungs like a deep dive into dark water, worse than the lingering pain of her healing throat. Her grandmother had made those braids, had labored hours over them, her sweet songs twining around Sirin as her clever fingers formed knots and plaits, as she weaved patterns to fit the curve of her skull, coils of black hair thick and dark as the skeins of her shadows.

No one replied to the boy. "Won't we?" he repeated. He began to cry again, and Kestrel shushed him, and the children gathered in, chains scraping and tangling as they pressed together, holding hands, holding on.

They didn't stay together. They were torn from one another as soon as the slaver ship reached port. Sirin remembered little about it save the blinding sun, and the heat like fire as she breathed, and the raw scrape of the manacles binding her wrists and ankles. The sea hushed somewhere out of sight, but the auction block was stifling, faces blurring in her vision. Lapidaean words filled the air; in her weeks of cleaning the ship Sirin had managed to pick up a few scraps of the slavers' language, and she recognized some of their words then.

Girl.

Quiet.

Obey.

She had obeyed: long years of it, of keeping her head down, of wearing sack-cloth, or pretty costumes, or prim uniforms, always high-necked to hide the ugly truth of her scar. Bought, and sold, and bought again- as a young girl's companion, once, to dress her and brush her hair and keep her safe from her merchant father's enemies. She'd brushed her long copper-red hair each night, listening to the girl prattle on about her life, thinking how easy it would be to twist the girl's long hair into a rope and strangle her with it.

How long had she kept her hate ground down deep inside her? It had festered there. It had rotted there. Her memories of Alkona were saw-toothed and red with gore, a rotting, monstrous mass picked to jelly by gulls.

It grew, and it grew. And her power, so long held back and hidden, grew too, a clenched muscle, a trapped scream.

She was a monster. She had left them all behind. She saw that now. She saw that, and knew someone had to bleed for it.

Maybe it should have been her.

To stand at cliff's edge. To fling herself over.

But that was just another monstrous thing, to give up. To let herself fall. There would be no one left, then, to make things right. She would abandon her memories, as much as she had abandoned her people.

She hadn't made a rope of the girl's hair to garrote her with, in the end. She came to her one night, and lifted her hands, and the shadows came to her: a gibbering swarm of horrors that smashed the lamps and stole the light. When the girl screamed, Sirin took hold of that pretty long hair and a shard of lampglass. She'd sawed off her hair, hank by hank, teeth grit, eyes wild, not caring when the glass slipped and gashed into the girl's scalp, not caring when it bit deep into her own palm.

She left the girl screaming and crying in the ruins of her hair and vanished, gone before the first alarm.

Some days Sirin wished she really had killed her. Some days she was glad to her marrow she hadn't. She wasn't sure which days were the better ones.

She'd searched. She had. Years of searching, years of death. She never found the men who'd come to Alkona, but she'd found others. She never found Kestrel, nor the little boy, nor any of the other children who had shared that hold with her. Empires and kingdoms, cities and freeholds, lawless archipelagos and armada cities, and she found no trace. It was as if the wide world had swallowed them up.

Someone has to bleed, she thought, again and again, even as she'd made her way to Estara, trailing slavers from their auction blocks, like eels to their dens. Someone has to make this right. It wasn't a cliff's edge, but it was the best she could do.

Until now.

Sirin stopped. Snow flurried down, kissing her skin as she lifted her head. Above towered a peak of black rock, slick and wind-carved, like the prow of some vast ship. It jutted from its collar of sea ice. Not just a cliff: a wall. Its upper ramparts were crumbled by millennia, ice warping its once-smooth surface out of shape, but Sirin knew it for what it was.

She felt it, in the pit of her. A call.

A pulse, like a heartbeat.

She drew closer, arms tightening around Puppy. The cave mouth swam into view: a great, ragged crescent bitten into the face of the wall, a chasm twisting into darkness. Sirin's shadows flowed toward it, pulling her with them; the wind became a rush, channeling downward, a great inhale sweeping her along with it and toward the dark. Her bloodied feet touched the lip of the cave, touched the black stone of the wall.

A flare filled her, a profound ache seizing her, so strong it stung tears to her eyes. She heard whalesong in the wind, slow and sorrowful, deep as the bones of the world.

The arch wasn't so much an arch, she thought, but a half-closed eye, an empty socket. She saw it, then, the shape of it, beneath her, before her: the smooth, curved ridge of its back, its flanks wave-licked, its fin jutting toward the sky.

The corpse of a great beast. The corpse of a great whale.

The Leviathan's first grave.

Sirin released her breath and limped up the jagged cliffside, over the edge of the dead Leviathan's eye, into the dark.

***

Deep beneath the earth.

There was no hint of daylight anymore. There hadn't been for hours. For some time there were carvings passing along the walls, primordial things, monsters coursing through waves, and unfamiliar constellations, and winged folk with spears, facing tusked beasts with maws full of stars. Aiatar carvings, left as if in offering to the dreaming god below. Now those were long gone. The darkness had closed over the whale's eye, and she was in it, too deep now to dream of turning back.

Footsteps skiffed across glass, a hiss like a whisper. Her reflection walked beside her, matching her step for step.

"You came," the other Sirin said.

She smiled, her braids trailing behind her as if caught in some strange wind. She was the reflection, Sirin thought, a perfect double in the cavern wall, each facet slick and smooth as a mirror.

And now I'm here, she said. And you, with me.

"With you?" The other Sirin smiled. "You were always alone."

The reflection shifted as she walked, changing as she flickered from one facet to another. Sirin recognized herself: hunched and ragged, her feet bare and bloodied, her eyes hollow pits in her skull. Her hair was stiff with snow, Puppy clutched to her chest.

Don't be afraid.

Her voice shivered through the darkness, warped and amplified by what sounded like a vast, cathedral emptiness. Her reflection did, too, flickering outward: countless reflections, one for each facet of the vault. Blue light glistered through them, flashing from facet to facet, filling the empty space ahead and around her.

It was like a hall, she thought, but endless, the walls black crystal, the limits lost- if there were limits. The floor stretched on and on. It was a lake- no, a mirror, a perfect smoothness of that crystal dark as the night sky. It made an inverted reflection of the cavern and her multiplied selves, on and on, unending: a thousand-thousand Sirins leading her into the dark.

The air tasted charged, tasted strange, storm wind and blood, harsh and alive. Something waited here, something sleeping, something dreaming.

Herself?

The Great Leviathan?

Her reflection's eyes glinted blue. She heard her own voice in her head.

You are the Leviathan, Sirin. You, and Luca, and the cloud gulls dancing, and the herring runs. And the rain, and the snow, and the moons overhead.

Something swam from the darkness, mist swirling from a sprawled form on the jagged dark stone of the cavern floor. Sirin jolted to a halt; Puppy gave a small whimper in her arms. The faint light touched limbs, dry bones, the tattered remnants of feathers. Silver ornaments glinted amidst the tangle of wings and half-transformed claws, great hooked talons grasping at nothing.

Sirin paced closer, her brow furrowed. The Aiatar had died midway between her bird and human forms, but she could still make out the elegant planes of her skull, her sharp teeth set in a frozen snarl, the remnants of white sapsilk clinging to the corpse.

A wound gaped in her chest, in the place where her heart had once been.

Queen Mazarin, the voice whispered. She came here for power, too. She came to drink it from the source, as if she took enough all the world might bend to her will. And she died like this, with Valeria's blade in her heart.

Sirin clenched her teeth. I don't seek the same power she did.

Don't you?

Sirin's inhale hissed away, away. She stepped over the high queen's corpse, from the passageway, onto the mirror lake itself. The crystal was frictionless underfoot, like she stood on nothing. In it- deep in it, like looking down through water with no idea of its depth- stars winked, pathways of them arcing through the vault of the night.

Her head swam. Maybe she wasn't looking down, but up. Vertigo plunged through her, and her vision trembled. She felt unmoored, no sense of space or time. The stars danced- no, they were gulls, flocks of them splintering- no, they were fish, great blooms and schools of them shining like blades in the deepest trenches of the sea-

Her mind trembled, poised between awe and terror. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the dark there was full of stars, too.

She saw herself again, as if outside her own body, as if through the eyes of one of her reflections- bruised and frightened, a child again running through bloody surf.

She was that child, and she was an old woman, her face an echo of her grandmother's, her throat crossed by that constant scar. She was all things between. She was bones deep beneath the earth, a grave-doll in a niche wreathed in sisi blossoms, an anchor for a ghost. She was a flicker in a womb, a quickening heartbeat, born to a mother dead young and a father unknown.

She was a girl racing along the clifftop, hungry for stories, hungry for the world, hungry for more.

She wore sapsilk and brocade, blue and gold, eel-scale and pearls. She held Luca's hands and watched two children play amongst cedars. They had her curls and her dark eyes and the faces of the children she remembered from the beach. This time they were not running from slavers' nets. This time they were alive.

Luca glanced at her with a smile, and it was easy here to smile back. It was easy here to forget, and to rest.

Facets flickered, on and on and always, stars, and always, power, rushing through her with the night, hissing away by day like the tide.

She gasped, tears filling her eyes. She stumbled ahead, sliding on the mirror crystal, finding her feet, breaking into a sprint.

Do you know where it came from?

A starry abyss.

A nothingness, like a dark sea.

Like stars make a firmament, like a school of fish swims as one, so countless pieces together make a whole. You are one of those pieces. I am all of them.

A death in the abyss.

Life, and warmth, taking root, given fuel to grow. Enough to make a world for small things in the dark.

I end, and you begin. I am all things, and I am alone. I reflect myself, endlessly, just as you reflect me-

She ran through the dark. Puppy was a warm weight in her arms. The heartbeat, the pulse, seemed to echo through it, and through her. She remembered Valeria's words- a place of power, a place of boundless magic. She dragged it up, armful after armful; it was a well, it was the sea, and there seemed to be no end to it. The weight built the more she pulled power from the Leviathan's dead heart. Her veins flashed starlight. Her power built, the pulse strengthening, unbearable, excruciating, more and more and more.

To make-

To unmake-

To build the world anew-

It was too much. Sirin's mouth snapped wide in a silent scream. She flung out her hands, fingers splayed. The darkness split; it churned like walls of water, stars swirling in its depths. She was looking down after all, and as the black crystal mirror of the floor tipped up to swallow her whole, it shattered.

Sirin fell. She plunged into nothingness. Stars seared past her cheeks. But she wasn't falling into some abyss, deeper into the Leviathan's heart- she was rising, the wind rushing past her, the shattered pieces of the cavern tumbling down around her.

Stone split and ground. They cracked, and moonslight poured in from above. Shards of sharp rock cascaded over Sirin. She tasted her own blood as one split her cheek.

Enough of this. She forced her shadows into claws and tore her way through the darkness. She hung onto Puppy with both arms, shielding it. She felt like she was being spat out, forced from the Leviathan's gullet like a piece of gristle. The crumbling shards became an avalanche as she ripped herself upward, toward the moonslight, out of the dead god's heart.

All at once Sirin broke into frigid air. She heaved herself out and collapsed, hard, to her knees. The power still coursed through her, so strong here she felt suspended within it.

She stood slowly, gasping for breath. Behind her a split gaped, a ragged gash in the rock wall still steaming with curls of her shadow.

Inches from her toes, the ground fell away. She had emerged onto a half-collapsed balcony, its parapet guarded by twin beasts, stone wings lifted, talons hooked and jaws asnarl. Sirin stared, lips parted, her body trembling. The triplet moons had before been on the wane, but now, impossibly, they shone full and heavy with their milk light.

She took her shadows, and she bent them, and the world was raked with them. A roar, like a gathering wave, and it whipped around her, spiraling into a maelstrom of shadow. No more whispers, but cries, screams, howls, the bass bellow of an approaching monster.

Ahead: a broken archway stood high on a crag, its upper curve long since crumbled to dust. The last remnants of an old watchtower, maybe, clinging on past all reason. A dizzying span of steps led up to it, slick with ice and treacherous. As good a place as any.

Come to me, monster.

She bent her head and began the climb, bringing her storm with her.

[books-of-the-great-leviathan]

Chapter 41- Luca

***

The air was clear and sharp as broken glass, growing ever colder the further north they flew. Each breath seared Luca's throat as he clung onto Niive's back, his muscles tight, each one of them working to keep him there and not sweep him off into empty sky. His arms burned, his legs worse, but he made himself keep hold.

He couldn't let go.

He couldn't stop now.

Coastlines skimmed below, made hazy as brushstrokes by cloud and distance. Niive flew tirelessly, her long, pointed wings scarcely seeming to move- just the ripple of her feathers as the air currents coursed over them, just the shift of her powerful muscles under Luca's hands, her neck stretched out before him, her crest flattened to her skull as she kept them on the course he set.

Night, and day, and night again.

The moons tightened to crescents above, the stars turning to daylight, then to gray, then to looming cloud, a strange, tidal landscape of them, eddying with the winds. They flew through crenelated stormheads, ghostly fortress towers hanging in midair, floating like the dead cities of cradle songs, only to be traveled to by ghosts, or holy sorts, or those lost beyond hope. In the gaps between, he caught glimpses of glittering water, and islands, so distant Luca might have covered them in the palm of his hand. At first they shone green as gemstones, then over leagues became barren, green to gray, flecked with white. The seas became darker and darker, heaving with whitecaps when the snow didn't shroud them entirely.

Was one of those islands Alkona? Luca couldn't be sure. Too long looking down and his eyes began to water from the force of the wind. It was strong enough to drown him where he clung. He pressed his face to Niive's feathers, concentrating on holding on.

Night became day became night again. This high up, the moons seemed close, like he might gather their light and drink it, rich as milk, from his cupped hands. Instead he gnawed on touga jerky and hardtack from the supplies Azare had given him, holding the rations carefully in his numb fingers lest he drop it and lose it in the clouds.

Once Niive's muscles spasmed under him, and he glanced up toward her head, eyes narrowed against the merciless wind.

"You all right?" he called.

She gave no response. He wasn't sure if she heard him or not.

She had to be exhausted. They'd been flying for days- he thought so, anyway; all he had to judge time by were his dwindling rations, his glimpses of moonslight, the day this far north nearly dark as night. Niive had barely stopped, barely moved, all her energy channeled into keeping the winds at her command, hurling them through the skies faster than any other winged thing that flew.

Luca's heart clenched. She was doing this in service of the Leviathan, he knew, but all he could think of was Sirin, was Puppy, her eyes in the sunlight as she'd kissed him, her palms flat to his chest, over his beating, living heart.

It would have been you.

When he dreamed- little scraps of dream, snagged on his mind when he snatched moments of sleep- it was of her. It was of the Leviathan, passing beneath him as he drifted in the deepwater of its consciousness. It was gray skies, and signal fires, and the pulse of wingbeats in the clouds. It was squid runs spilling sunlight through trenches far below the surface of the sea, and it was tidal waves sweeping destruction over islands, children cowering as the wave's shadow reached for them. It was of the cycle, the life that died to become life again, the dark that came before the light, the dark that came after.

Balance, the Leviathan whispered, in his voice, in his mind, blue eyes wide and bright and full of fear.

It would have been you-

As ever, the knife hilt pressed to his ribs, bruising him each time he shifted, or breathed. He wanted to fling it over Niive's side and watch it spin as it fell, but he could never quite bring himself to do so.

I want to save you.

I want to help you.

But if he couldn't? If all he could do was stop her, would he?

He'd asked himself such a question before, on faraway seas, Cereza cursed and dying belowdecks, the Great Blue spread before him and reflecting the night sky. A starry abyss. He'd clutched the ancestral Valere harpoon in his hands, and knew then that he would do anything to save his sister. Now it was not Cereza, but the skies, and the seas, and all the islands in them, and Sirin, always Sirin.

Her hands, holding his, at the end of the world.

Her net of shadows, holding him, bringing him back to the surface.

Make a choice, Luca, he thought. She did. She chose to be a monster. She chose power, over all else, over you-

He clenched his teeth. No, he told himself, cutting off his thoughts with a hard shake of his head. She had saved him. She had spared him when by all rights she could have let him drown, and bought her freedom with his death.

He had to try.

Night came, and with it: stars. They were hard here, and brilliant, not glowing but shining, like chips of whaleglass scattered in the sea. It looked like the sea, even: currents of stars, cloud skimming the sky's edges like mist off the ocean.

Luca slept. When he woke, he had to warm his face in his hands, his eyelids frozen shut so hard he thought the skin would tear if he forced them. His vision was blurred, all smears of gray and white, but when it sharpened he saw it wasn't his eyes that were confused, but the world. Snow whipped past his cheeks, fragments of ice needling at his skin as he peered over Niive's side.

Below, closer than before, the sea was iron-gray and rising in vast white-webbed swells. Sea-ice spread ahead, a great fractured expanse of pale nothing, gray and white and riven with crevasses. Icebergs stood like shipwrecks, dirty-white one moment, then translucent blue the next, glassy and spectral.

Niive skimmed lower, her wings near-silent as they parted the low clouds and descended into the haze of snow that hung low over the landscape. The sea ice spread, and spread, on and on to the horizon. Far in the distance, through the blizzard, Luca made out the looming shapes of what looked like mountains, vast ones, reaching toward the sky, but the snow coursed thicker and he lost them, swallowed up by the blizzard.

"Are we close?" he called to Niive.

She let out a fluting shriek in response.

"Can you take us lower?"

Luca felt the wind flex around him, felt the radiant cold of the sea as Niive descended with an upturn of her pointed wingtips.

He searched the sea-ice again. Dark fangs of rock jutted from its fantastically-carved surface, like teeth from a mouth, plumes of icy wind skating from their crags. The sea shifted; this low, he heard the reverberating crack and boom as the ice parted on the waves, crevasses gaping like monstrous mouths before the currents brought them crashing back together again, hard enough to shear ships in half and send them to the glowlands. Nothing else moved.

Niive dipped lower, low enough for her shadow to skim the ice, vast and wide-winged, so fast it blurred across the snow and water. Luca let out his breath between clenched teeth.

Where are you?

Where?

All at once, he saw it. In the distance, something fluttered: a ragged scrap, dark against the unrelenting black and white and deep, glacial gray of the landscape.

"Niive!" Luca called, pointing. "Over there. There! You see that? Take us there."

She veered. Luca's heart pounded in his throat as the flutter neared, as it consolidated into the shape of a ship. A mast rose from the ice; the flutter took on color, a glint of blue. A Lapidaean flag, torn to tatters by the harsh wind. Rigging, sails, and all rose from the ship's icelocked prison, frozen solid and fringed in icicles. Luca recognized it; he would have even without its flag. A Lapidaean warship. Isabella's brig.

It was tilted hard to the side, forced upward by the sea-ice that had formed around and beneath it. A gash gaped in its hull, below the waterline. Waves boomed through it, their echo amplified and made hollow by the endless arctic silence.

"It's hers." Luca shook Niive's shoulder-joint. "It's Sirin's ship. Take me down."

She tipped her head to the side as they circled, staring back at him with one golden eye. He imagined her voice, flat and deeply sardonic. You think she's waiting down there for you, Valere?

Luca stared back, undaunted. "Take me down."

She banked hard, pirouetting on one wing; Luca's stomach lurched. Niive's wingbeats thrummed against the air as she alit on the warship's bowsprit, stumbling a little, wood screeching as she curved her massive talons in deep. Luca stumbled off her neck; his muscles screamed in protest, but he managed to keep his feet, to lean against Niive's neck as she shuddered, making small keens of exhaustion and pain. Luca pressed his eyes shut, hands deep in her warm feathers, breathing deep for long moments before he lifted his face again.

Her neck was curved back on itself, her head lowered. As he looked at her, one of her eyes slid open, pupil turning on him. Her jaws were parted, and he heard the faint whistle of her breathing between the points of her teeth.

"You all right?" Luca managed. His face was numb; he hadn't realized he was so cold.

She let out a soft snarl.

He pressed his hand to her beak, then faced the deck. Waves hissed and soughed; he felt their impact in his bones. A chill coursed through him. The whole of the ship from yardarm to keel was changed, was wrong: the once-ruddy cedarwood shone pale, silvery and bleached, streaked with cracks and gouged with wounds, like some vast beast had taken claws to it. Each time the waves struck he heard the crack and grind of its ice prison, of its planks, eerie and strange in the hush.

Luca moved down the deck, walking awkwardly along its tilted surface. He bent and pressed his fingers to one of the gouges. Its edges were clean, sliced into place.

By her, he knew. Her shadows. Her power.

As he stood, wood groaned underfoot. He stumbled back as it cracked open, explosive as a gunshot, shattering the silence. Shards of wood rained belowdecks, the jagged edges of the hole brittle and crumbling.

Breathing hard, Luca brushed his hand along the railing, and it sifted away under his palm, ashy and fine.

She'd done this. The entire ship, turned dry and brittle as a husk, drained spectral by her power. He glanced back at Niive, her eyes as wide as his own.

Luca's mouth tasted bitter as he hurried down the deck, scrambling from railing to ratline to mast, pulling himself along hand over hand.

"Sirin?" he called. His voice echoed, reflected back on itself. He opened the belowdecks hatch, only to find churning seawater, the corridors flooded. "Puppy?"

He made it to the stern doors and pulled at one of them, teeth grit at the effort. Frozen hinges cracked and gave way, the door swinging wide. Grit skittered into the darkness beyond. Luca's breath steamed in the frigid air. The stateroom was all gloom and disarray, desk and chairs strewn like toys, thrown against the walls from whatever impact had wrecked the ship. The lamps were dark and crumpled, their once-bright brass flaking and corroded as if exposed to the weather for years, not days. Maps and charting equipment lay twisted and scattered. The transom windows stood broken. Wind keened past the points of glass hanging onto their frames.

Luca searched the darkness, his heartbeat in his mouth.

"Sirin?" he said.

"She's not here," Niive said, behind him. Luca turned. She stood in her human form, wings half-spread for balance. Her shoulders were hunched, her face stony. "She and the creature are both long gone."

"This ship..." Luca touched the doorframe. It crumbled under his hand. "It's like she drank it dry."

"Her power has to feed on something."

"She used to be powerless in the daytime, but at night-" He looked up at Niive. "It's balance, isn't it? Her abilities."

"Everything has its price," Niive said, hugging herself around her stomach. "She defies that price."

"If the monster finds her before we do-"

"There will no longer be a Sirin to save or stop," Niive said. "She will be unmade. Remade. Into what..."

She shrugged, her wings stirring and falling with the gesture. "I cannot say."

"I think I get the idea," Luca said quietly.

He sniffed and lifted his eyes to the bowsprit, pointing straight as a harpoon toward the horizon. "We follow them, then. We find them first. Can you...will you be all right?"

Niive nodded, but her eyes were dull with exhaustion. "I must be."

"Thank you," Luca said. He touched her pale forearm. It was frigid, even through his sealskin glove.

The ship shuddered. Luca stumbled against Niive, grabbing her shoulders; she snarled, eyes wide and scandalized.

"Let go of me, Valere," she said.

"Oh. Sorry." Luca released her. He searched the water. "Did you feel that? What in all Hells was-"

The impact came again: a vibration, not just in the ship but in the sea, too. The waves frothed, rising, no longer choppy but smoothing over into swells. One broke, and boiled, and from below: something bellowed, a bass thrum that filled the air, the ship, down to Luca's marrow. Adrenaline flared, but there was no lightning, no blue glow.

"That's not the Leviathan," he said.

Niive snarled something in witch-tongue Luca was sure was a curse. "We have to go. Now."

Water surged, and geysered. Hot steam blasted into the sky, mere meters from the gunwale. Spume spattered Luca's face, warm and viscous. An exhale, he realized. Something had just snorted a year's worth of hot snot over him.

Niive twisted, feathers bursting from her skin. Her wings sought the skies as she reared into her bird form. She screeched, and Luca threw himself toward her, hooking his arms over her neck and scrambling, ungainly, onto her back. His heel jabbed her ribs; she screeched again, in pain this time, and shot Luca a yellow-eyed glare.

"Forgive me later!" Luca yelled. "Just fly!"

She drove her wings down. The ship groaned behind them, a gunshot percussion of cracks chasing them as Niive spiraled into the sky. Luca threw a glance back as the entire deck split down its width. Something was crushing the ship from beneath; as he watched, it bowed into a V, waves crashing, spilling over the deck and swamping it, ice sundered as the entire ship was sucked down into the black water.

Niive let out a cry. Luca spun back round in time to see something swing toward them: the mainmast, felled, in their path.

"Bank left!" he yelled.

Niive swerved hard to port, tucking her wings like a sparrow as she dived under the mast, clearing it with inches to spare. A frozen line sliced past Luca's face; he ducked out of its way. Below, the ship was nearly gone, the sea white with froth. Something moved in its heart, something massive. A dark shape hurtled beneath the water, flinging itself upward.

Toward them.

The water erupted. Luca's breath felt ripped from him. Jaws gaped, massive and beaked and lined in double rows of teeth, glistening black maw and armored head, craggy as a rock formation and crusted in barnacles. The neck followed, ringed in muscle and armored like its head, and then the body: vast and broad, foreclaws ripping through the remnants of the ship like it was paper, crushing it into the surrounding ice.

Luca glimpsed scale, tough and gray-white, and shell thicker than warship armor, ridged down its length, toughened and gnarled with centuries of ingrown ice.

"Faster!" Luca roared, and the ice tortoise roared, too, heat and spume and a blast of reeking wind. Luca felt Niive catch it, propelling them upward, spiraling into the clouds on the wave of air. The air thrummed as the ice tortoise's jaws clashed shut just clear of Niive's tailfeathers, and then was gone: a shape in the clouds, and then nothing.

"Did you see that!" Luca cried. He let out a wild laugh. "Did you bloody see that-"

He looked up at Niive. Her beak was open, jaws gaping, but her eyes were shut. Luca blinked, then felt her breathing under him, fast and labored.

"Niive?" he said.

He tasted blood on the wind. He glanced down, to her side. A shard of wood jutted from her ribs, just under her wing joint. Blood pulsed forth, thick and dark, with each wingbeat.

"Niive," Luca said. "Triune-"

She quivered under his hands, then banked, descending.

"Just ride the winds," Luca murmured, stroking her feathers. "Don't strain yourself. Just ride them down."

They broke through the cloud layer. The snow seemed thicker, the sea-ice obscured through heavy mist. Luca saw what looked like a relatively flat plateau of ice as Niive headed toward it, gliding on the breeze.

They drew lower, closer. Luca drew a sharp breath. They were coming in fast, too fast. Their shadow skimmed the snow, lower, lower, the ground a blur-

Impact jarred through Luca. He tore free, flung, weightless and tumbling. He hit the ground, hard. Red cracked through his body, and he cried out, but his mouth was full of snow. His vision blurred, and it took a moment of adrenaline and shock before Luca realized he'd stopped moving. He lay in the snow, dazed, half of his face numb, the other half spattered in flakes, waiting for the pain to fade.

He pushed himself upright, spitting out his mouthful of snow. He lay in a shallow crater of it. The world was hazy around him, full of gently-falling flakes. Higher up the clouds churned, pulled and pushed, a reflection of the stormy sea, but down here the winds were lighter. A great furrow was carved in the snow, flecked with broken black feathers and tufts of down, and blood. Too much blood. The red was so bright against the stark landscape it hurt his eyes.

"Niive," he gasped, and staggered to his feet.

She lay some yards off, shivering, curled in on herself, halfway to human- a monstrous thing, mangled and strange, her feet long and scaled and taloned, one arm fringed in feathers, the skin delicate, her fingers still fused and elongated. Her face lay in a wreath of feathers, paler even than before. Her lips were near white from blood loss. She clutched her human hand to her wound. Blood pulsed through her fingers.

"Niive," Luca said. He stumbled down into the crater and knelt at her side. She stared blearily up at him. "Triune-"

He touched her shoulder, her hands. "I...I'm going to find us somewhere safe, all right? Somewhere you can rest."

He searched the desolate landscape. There. A fang of rock stood through the gathering blizzard, a dark sentinel against the sky. There was a fold of shadow at its base- if not a cave, certainly a better place to weather the blizzard than out here.

He looked back at Niive again. She was still transforming, slowly, painfully, feathers shrinking in pulses, as if it took her gathered bursts of concentration.

"Bank left?" she hissed, between pointed teeth. "I...I know how to fly, Valere..."

Luca managed a laugh. "Sorry. Habits. I once had a flying ship, did you know that?"

Her arm-wing shrank a little more, her fingers peeling apart, becoming human. Scales retracted; her feet flexed as the talons crumbled away. "That's impossible, Valere," she rasped. "Ships cannot fly."

"You've got me there. It couldn't really fly. It almost could, though. And I was working on making one that could take to the skies, truly, like a cloud gull skims those holy blue vaults. Wouldn't that be a fine thing?"

"Unnatural," Niive said.

"We live in unnatural times. Listen, I need to lift you. Is that-"

"Do what you must."

Her feathers sloughed away as he fit his arms under her and heaved her upright, against him; they lay scattered and broken in her shape, like a shed skin. Niive sagged against him. She was lighter than she looked.

Bird bones, Luca thought as she hooked her arm over his shoulder, her claws digging into his coat.

"Just hold on," he told her, but she didn't respond. He dragged her a step, his teeth grit, icy tears streaking his face. "Cereza will never forgive me if you die on my watch."

"Neither will I," Niive muttered.

Luca held on tighter.

***

It was a cave after all: a rift in the rock that belled into a cavern. One wall was natural stone, the other sea-ice dark as deepwater. It glistened like whaleglass as Luca settled Niive on the ground and struck a match, lighting the ork-oil lamp from the supplies and setting it in a niche, where it sputtered, filling the cavern with dancing shadows.

Luca tucked the pack under Niive's head, then knelt again at her side, squinting at her wound in the inadequate light.

"I'll bet you enjoyed that," she muttered.

"What?"

"Seeing an ice tortoise up close."

He mustered a smile. "Next time I'd like to get a little closer. All in the spirit of scholarly discovery, of course."

"Next time."

Luca touched her side, and she hissed. He let out his breath, then stripped off his gloves, rolling his sleeves past his elbows. "I'm no surgeon, Niive-"

"Just get on with it."

He set to work. The shard of wood had impaled her just beneath her arm, angling upward and through the muscle. Blood oozed around its base, her skin spackled rust-colored where it had begun to dry and flake. How she'd managed to keep on the wing, Luca couldn't fathom. She must have been in agony the whole time.

"Here. Have some of this." He uncapped the phial of night-drop and held to to her lips. "Just a little."

She swallowed, wrinkling her nose at the bitter taste. "Am I bleeding, Valere?"

"A bit. I'm no expert in witch guts, but if you're arranged anything like islanders are I don't think it got anything vital-"

"I bleed enough and that ceases to matter."

"Yes," Luca admitted. "That is rather the situation."

Niive settled, folding her hands over her stomach. Her face was glazed with sweat. Luca gently brushed aside a strand of hair from her cheek. Her eyes stayed on him, unblinking.

"You know," Luca said, "Once, I thought I'd never have the chance to see a witch in the flesh."

"Now you may well see one die."

"Don't be so pessimistic."

"Is it to be denial, then, Valere?" Niive's lips thinned in a tight smile. "You do rather make an art of it."

"Better than making it a chore."

"What was your ship's name, the flying one?"

"The Wasp."

"Wasps have vicious stings. Is that what you're planning, Valere, with that knife of yours?"

Luca reached in the pack and drew it out. He pushed a finger's length of blade from the sheath with his thumb, watching the glint of the lantern over the spellforged steel. "If there's any other way, no."

"And if there isn't?"

He slid the knife back with a click. "If I have to kill Sirin, you mean?"

She did mean. Her face was still, her brows drawn together. Luca drew an unsteady breath. "Then I'm death, too," he said, quietly, echoing what she'd told him long ago, under the stars of the Great Blue.

She remembered. She lowered her eyes. "Your library," she said.

"...What?"

"The hidden one. Full of Aiatar books? You and Cereza will never be able to read it on your own. I can help you. We can find the secrets together. Maybe, there, we can...find some kind of...understanding."

"I thought you didn't consort with islanders," Luca said.

"Do not grow cocky with me, Valere. I can still steal the breath from your lungs, even with half my blood fled from me."

"Time enough for that later." Luca took her hand and held it. "Get some rest."

She did, sinking into pained sleep, and some time later so did Luca. No dreams found him, nothing but empty night, and howling wind, and absence. When he jolted awake he thought for a panicked moment he'd sunk too deep into his dreams, that the darkness had infected the waking world, and then he remembered where he was.

The lantern still gave off a blue glimmer. He turned up the wick again, his muscles stiff and frozen. Even inside his fur-lined gloves his hands felt clumsy as old wood.

Something skittered in the dark.

Luca tensed, but the circle of light touched nothing but ice and rock. Niive was awake; he heard the hiss of her inhale.

"Quiet," she whispered.

"What is it?"

"I don't know, but-"

A breeze kissed the back of Luca's neck. He whirled, drawing his knife in a flash of blue steel. Too slow. A cold spearpoint pressed into Luca's throat before he could so much as strike.

He froze. The point was a shard of what looked like black glass, one edge jagged, the other slick and razor-sharp. His eyes traveled up the shaft of the spear to a pair of gloved hands. The stranger stared back, eyes glittering through the slit eyeholes of a mask, painted with spiral patterns in white. A ragged mantle swathed the stranger from hood to waist, made of thick gray-white fur; the rest was ooshka hide, worn and cracked by countless blizzards. A hooked knife made of the same black stone hung from their belt.

Luca exhaled and glanced around. More strangers stood in a semicircle around him and Niive. He counted half a dozen, each dressed in furs and masks, each with spears leveled.

The stranger spoke, the language all hisses and barbed consonants, rough and strange. Luca's heart leaped. Witch-tongue. This stranger spoke witch-tongue.

"I'm sorry, I don't-" he began.

The stranger knocked his knife from his grip. Pain shot through Luca's wrist. "Gah!" he cried. "Fine, fine, I understood that."

"He says...we must get up," Niive said. "Says...says we must...come with them."

"What? Why?"

The stranger reached for their mask and pulled it away from their face. Luca's eyes widened. The young man underneath had skin so dark it shone blue, his hair jet-black and cropped close to his skull, shaved along the sides in swirling patterns like his mask. His lips were drawn back from sharp teeth. His eyes were luminous gold.

Hawk's eyes.

Aiatar eyes.

He spoke again. Niive translated, her voice hushed and halting. "He says we must come with them so they can take us to- to her."

[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.

[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 37- Luca

***

The Leviathan's storm shattered, torn apart by a fantail of blue fire.

"Bell!" Luca cried.

He rushed to the gunwale, but even leagues off he knew there was nothing he could do but watch. The storm subsided, the seas smoothed over, and the monster sank- not gone, but wounded, the ocean thick with godsblood, and nothing left at its heart, nothing but black smoke, nothing but a roiling inferno of spellfire.

"No," he said. "Triune, no, no, no-"

The swell hit the warship- the shockwave from the explosion, a churning wall of glowing water that flung the warship further from Lapide's coast. The sea spun on its axis, the sky a whirl of blue sparks and twisting clouds. Luca jolted against the gunwale, but hung on, Sirin crouched at his side, her eyes narrowed as she watched the burning waves. The sails billowed and groaned, and the ship stayed upright, pushed toward the open sea.

The ocean burned like it had in the Leviathan's maelstrom, a torrent of blue fire, the wind thick with smoke and embers the color of a summer sky.

Please, please- Luca scrambled up onto a ratline, hanging on with one hand as he leaned out over the side of the ship as far as he could. He searched the waves, but saw nothing but more flames, more smoke, steam billowing as the spellfire vaporized the surface of the ocean. He glimpsed the firelight glistening off the ridge of the monster's back before it dived, and was gone, too.

Gone, like Isabella.

Not for good. It wasn't dead yet. It would come back.

His breathing tore through him, his arms trembling. He folded against the tarred ropes, then lifted his head again, forcing himself to watch. As he did, silver light fluttered through the smoke. Enzo's ghosts, released? He wasn't sure. He watched the last glimmer of silver light before it was lost in the underlit clouds.

Puppy whined softly, nudging at his foot with its muzzle.

"I...I know," Luca said.

He made himself breathe, made himself climb from the ropes and take the ship's wheel again, hands shaking as he gripped its pegs.

Luca, Sirin signed.

"They just gave their lives to buy us time," he said. "I'm not about to waste it."

The lines creaked as he steered the ship round; the boom swung over his head, the warship responding smoothly under his hands. He scrubbed at his eyes with his forearm as he aimed the bowsprit for the horizon.

Rashavir.

Even now, he felt a thrill at the name. Sunken Rashavir, the ruined city, icelocked and unknown. It was a place few returned from, and none without scars. Countless times he'd lovingly pored over its coordinates, the tangle of currents and sea-ice that surrounded it in labyrinthine pathways, dangerous for even the most seasoned sailor. It lay far north of Lapide, north of the vast Buyani archipelago, past the Ork Roads and at the rim of the Outer Sea, at the arctic edge of the the Great Blue itself.

Isabella would have charts below, maps and equipment, enough to steer him true. Still, this ship was stocked for a short coastal journey, not an expedition north across the open ocean.

"We'll need supplies," he muttered. Sirin stood by the wheel, watching the horizon as they sailed further and further from the last fringes of the stormclouds lingering above. "We'll freeze if we head north like this."

He tallied up the journey as best he could in his head. "We'll need...we'll need explosives...the ice shouldn't be thick this time of year, but...there's unusual wildlife up there, mora morozovye- ice tortoises- who don't much like visitors."

He glanced at Sirin. "Unless-"

I can deal with the wildlife, she signed, her gaze still fixed on the horizon.

"Good." Luca took an unsteady breath. "We can do this." He reached for Puppy and rested his hand on its head, letting the little creature's warmth steady him.

"We can," he said again, and Puppy stared back, its eyes reflecting the daylight.

Luca looked over his shoulder. Already, Lapide had fallen away, the landmass a dark line on the horizon, burning sea obscured by the smoke. Barrier islets dotted the waves, mostly sea-stacks crowned in small cedars and colonies of seabirds; others were little more than sandbars and rock-crags, lonely and desolate.

Silence fell, broken only by the slap of waves against the hull, the creak and groan of the sails, the hish of the bow parting the waves.

Luca watched Lapide recede, watched the burning ocean. He hurt, all of him, down to his guts. He wanted to sink to the deck, to never get back up again, but he couldn't. He couldn't throw away what Isabella had done.

Luca, Sirin signed. I am sorry.

He nodded, his face crumpling.

I am. She reached for him, prising his hands from the wheel. Grief speared his heart. He curved toward her, seeking her, pressing closer. His forehead met hers, her damp curls, her scarred cheek. Her skin was cold, her grip firm. Blue embers danced in the wind, hissing as they touched and charred the deck.

I know how I can end this, she said.

"Sirin-"

I know. Her dark eyes searched his face. She touched the line of his cheek, tracing one of his razor scars to his lower lip. So many things have been lost.

"You won't be another," Luca snarled. "We can do this, Sirin. You and me. Now come on. Enough of this, enough of- of- I won't watch anyone else I love die, do you hear me? I can't-"

He made to pull away from her, but she grabbed his shoulder, turning him back. Her eyes were bright, the air around her tense with power.

"Sirin?" Luca said.

It's you, Luca.

"What?"

It's you, she said, and drew his face to hers.  

A lilt of her lips-

The hiss of her breath.

The salt of her mouth on his.

Sirin's fingertips skimmed his throat, finding the soft skin at the corner of his jaw. Her fingers were cold. They stung. Her lips touched his.

A sunburst flare coursed through his nerves. She kissed him, soft, a bare brush of her mouth, and then again. Harder. Inelegant, unpracticed and desperate, crushing her face to his, holding fistfuls of his hair in both hands. Luca moved in; he gripped her face, he pulled her to him, against him, unable to be close enough, unable to kiss her enough. Triune- he thought, somewhere in the focus, the fervor, the pulse of his heart. Not sinking, but drowning.

Warm tears stung his mouth as she pulled away. Sirin was crying, tears streaming down her face as she slid her fingers from his hair. Her palms went flat on his chest, over his pounding heart.

Luca stared at her, breathless, shaking.

"Sirin?" he said.

It's you, she said again. Her fingers slipped down his arms between sentences. It would have been you.

Her hands clamped around his wrists, tight as fetters. She twisted, hauling Luca aloft like he weighed nothing. With one great heave she flung him over the side of the ship, into empty air.

Luca's cry was lost in the wind. He plummeted, an instant of numb weightlessness, and crashed hard into the waves.

The water closed over him. He plunged down- two yards, five- before he felt his body again, before he gathered his senses enough to kick out and claw his way back to the surface. His head broke through and he gasped, treading water, the waves threatening to push him back under again.

The warship wavered ahead of him, dark against the dawn sky. As he watched, shadow erupted from its deck, from Sirin, standing with arms spread: tongues of darkness, twining around sails and lines, snaking across the hull. They transformed the ship into something from a cradle song, a shadow ship, wholly under her command.

It lunged ahead as he kicked out, like he might catch up to it. To her. He glimpsed Puppy by Sirin's side, restrained in a cage of shadow.

Realization seized him, cold and awful. Panic flared through his nerves. He kicked out again, clawing through the water, a wild, graceless thrash.

"Sirin!" he cried. His voice broke over her name. "Sirin, no! Sirin!"

The ship was already far off, racing over the waves.

"Sirin!" Luca yelled again.

But it was too late. The ship was gone, and Sirin was gone with it.

***

A wave slapped him hard in the face, nearly swamping him. He'd drown if he stayed out here. Coughing, he searched the ocean for land. Daylight gleamed off pale sand: a beach. One of the small islets, no more than two hundred yards off. Luca cast a last desperate look at the ship, then turned and kicked out for land.

He made it as the morning chill began to burn off. Heat shimmered above the beach as he dragged himself from the surf and staggered upshore.

Luca's boots hung around his neck; salt burned in his eyes. He didn't feel his limbs. He didn't feel much of anything. He lifted his head, squinting past the blinding sunstruck crescent of beach. The island spread before him, no more than a desolate crag of gray-white rock spattered with seabird spoor, a knot of wind-stripped cedars clinging to its upper battlements. Clumps of spiny grass rustled in the breeze, the sound like faraway whispers, lonely and lost.

Another lusher islet was visible to the west, between these shores and Lapide's mainland. Luca didn't think he could swim the distance. He didn't know if he could so much as make the thirty feet between the shore and the scree.

He managed another step before he collapsed. Powdery sand filled his hair and scrunched against his face. He flipped himself onto his back as warm surf rushed around him. Don't drown in an inch of water, Valere, he told himself. Terrible way to go.

Seabirds circled above, wavering in his vision. Luca stared up at them. He couldn't move. He had to move. He'd bake in this heat, and then the birds would descend and begin at his eyes, whether he was dead or not. Wouldn't that be a shame? She does so love my eyes.

He didn't move.

Sirin was gone. Sirin had taken Puppy, and was going to Rashavir. And when she got there, and when the Leviathan came for its counterpart, then, then-

Luca's mouth tasted bitter. The seabirds were getting lower. Maybe they weren't waiting for him to succumb to heatstroke, after all.

Forcing himself onto his hands and knees took a long time, but once he did, he made himself drag up the sand, into the shadow under the rocks. Cool darkness fell over him, and he breathed hard, aching, weary to the core. And hot. And sweaty. Too many bloody clothes. He shucked off his waistcoat and flung it toward the surf.

"Hells with you, Sirin!" he yelled, his voice cracking. His boots followed the waistcoat, one at a time. "Hells with you, and with you, too, Isabella, and you, Acier, you especially- Hells with you, Mother, and Valeria, and all the bloody rest- I hope all the horrors of the deep are sucking on your bones right bloody now-"

He kicked the second boot, trying to get, at the very least, a good arc. Pain shot through his foot.

"Gah! Shit," he said, doubling over. "Shit, shit-"

He stood, panting, hands braced on his knees. His burst of wild fury left him all at once, and he sank to the ground. He slumped over his knees, staring out at the vivid blue ocean, the long fold of the surf, the lambent green places that marked reefs below the waterline.

His foot still hurt. He rubbed his bruised toes and closed his eyes, leaning back against the rocks, trying not to think, trying to concentrate on anything but the pain.

The day sank into noon. No temperate mountain climate, not here. Out here the heat was blistering, even in the shade. Luca found a spring amongst the rocks, a foul-tasting little burble that nevertheless dripped clear from his fingertips, free of salt. Still, by midday his head was spinning, his body drenched in sweat. How long had it been since he'd eaten? Too long.

Stupid, Valere, he told himself.

He retrieved his waistcoat, soaked it in seawater, and tried his best to make it into a crude headscarf to stave off sunstroke. He felt ridiculous. His vision whirled as he shifted- double the seabirds, double the waves. Were those birds getting closer, or was he seeing things? Troubling, if so. He wasn't sure of it, or of anything.

One of the cloud gulls alit on a nearby rock. It cocked its head, sizing him up with one bead-black eye. Luca regarded it.

"I have to find a way," he told it. "You think you can help me with that?"

It quorked, clicking its beak.

"I don't have anything for you. Not even me, not while I'm still breathing. I'm afraid I wouldn't taste too nice, anyhow." Luca's eyes drifted half-shut. "I'm a fool, really. Then and now and always. I love her. Did I tell you that? I love her so much I can barely stand it."

The gull hopped closer.

"What do you want?" Luca said. "I told you. Can't eat me until I'm dead."

It took an experimental snap at Luca's arm. He shooed it away, and it clattered to the skies, rejoining its fellows.

` Luca examined the handprint Sirin had burned into his arm. His throat tightened.

"We could have done it, Sirin," he murmured. "You, and me."

He'd failed her before. Were all his promises to her empty? Lapide had failed her too, it and all  the world. What a broken place it must seem to her, and never more than now. It was a thing built on dead empires and stolen children, built on fear and pain, slaves and injustice. Little wonder the broken Leviathan had resurrected a creature of rage.

Sirin had the power to change it, to remake it, to destroy all that stood against her. What god could compete with her own hand given monstrous strength, and damn the consequences? Not even the Leviathan could do that. Not even the Leviathan would. It was as ever balance, never one part eclipsing the other, never one sole state for too long.

Maybe her way was better. Maybe she was right. End all things, end it in darkness. There was no hope for saving it. There was no hope for anything.

To make, to unmake.

To build the world anew.

Luca felt something hard in his pocket as he shifted his weight. He withdrew it. Whaleglass glimmered in the sunlight. He turned it over in his hand: the shard strung on witch-hair that had once marked the entrance to Valeria's tomb. Luca studied the shard, its facets, the many colors rippling in the crystal's depths. There seemed to be stars there, deep inside. He felt a rush of vertigo, as if he were not looking in but down, endlessly down, into some unfathomable abyss.

Luca remembered Sirin's laugh as they'd danced at Nagidanze, the look in her eyes as she watched the Leviathan dissolve into the seas. The strength in her hands as she held onto him, at the end of the world, at the end of everything. He'd never felt closer to home than that moment in the light of the burning Leviathan, that moment when he'd held her and longed for more. He'd never been closer to rest. Not to die with her, but that longing to live.

Whatever Sirin thought, whatever ancient grief drove her, she was wrong about one thing. This world, with its wonders and wilderness, its mercies and its fury, was all of it worth the keeping. It had to end, but it didn't have to die. Luca knew the world was broken, knew it was cursed. He would not be broken with it.

And neither would Sirin.

Luca shivered. The heat of the day had begun its decline, the first cool gust of night breeze skittering over the ocean. He hugged his arms around himself. The light turned liquid with the coming dusk, a melting wash turning the shallows translucent green and gilding the sparse cedars and barren rocks. High above, he made out the ghostly crescent of the Great Moon.

White glinted, somewhere out past the reefs.

Luca squinted. A gull? No, too big. The heat-shimmer made it seem half a dream. Was it real, or was he sun-addled, seeing ghosts, gone mad at last?

No, he realized. It wasn't a dream. It was a sail.

Luca pushed to his feet. "Hey!" He staggered down the beach, waving his arms. "Hey! I'm here! I'm over here!"

It drew closer, edges sharpening, becoming distinct: a sleek gray schooner, twin-masted and flying no flags. He didn't recognize it, but as it cruised past the reefs, close enough for Luca to hear the slap of the waves against its hull, he made out who stood at the bow. She climbed into a dinghy; shouts rang across the water, shouts of his name. He stood, swaying, vision blurred as he watched the dinghy draw near.

Cereza vaulted out, splashing into the shallows, her skirt girded short. Severin Azare followed, his eyes narrowed against the sunlight.

"Luca," Cereza gasped, reaching for him. Luca slumped against her, his legs giving out, his head pounding.

"Cee," he murmured.

"Triune, you're heavy-"

"Get him to the dinghy. He'll be starving, heat-addled." Azare's voice. Luca heard his own pulse sloshing in his ears.

"How did you find me?" he slurred.

"I'll always find you, gull-brain. Come on-"

"She's gone, Cee. Sirin's gone. We have to...we have to..."

"Azare, help me-"

"Easy, Valere. Stay with us."

Too late. The world slipped away, and turned red, then black, as Luca passed out.

***

They revived him with whiskey, with pungent heartsbride that cleared the haze in his head, bringing him back to consciousness on a bunk off the Mistfox's stateroom that Luca suspected was Azare's own. Now he huddled, wrapped in a blanket, before the Witchhunter's desk.

Ziva Lapin had wordlessly pressed a cup of night-drop tea on him, but Luca couldn't drink more than a mouthful.

"She's gone," he said, "for Rashavir. And she took Puppy with her."

Azare and Lapin stared at him across Azare's desk. In the corner Cereza and Alois were whispering. Cereza's eyes were red and puffy, while Alois looked haggard, the lines of his face drawn tight with grief. He'd lost a friend as much as Luca and Cereza had lost a sister.

"The Sunken bloody Ruins?" Lapin said. She stood at Azare's side, her muscular arms folded. "They're just the remains of some ancient city."

"They're more than that. Much more. They're the site of the Leviathan's first death, the place where it spat out the world." Luca shook his head. "What matters is that all magic is stronger there, and that includes hers. I thought we could use it to remake the Great Leviathan, but...she's taken Puppy as a lure. She means to join herself with the monster. She means to take that power, all the power of a destroyer god, and make it hers."

Azare studied him, his expression unreadable. Lapin scoffed. "Why by all Saints would she want to do that?"

"Vengeance," Azare said quietly.

Luca nodded. He'd come to full of aches, and the night-drop tea muted them, but even so the small movement set off fireworks behind his eyes. "I was too bloody focused on finding Valeria to listen, to realize what she was planning-"

"Easy enough to overlook the impending birth of an abomination," Lapin said, her tone dry as dust.

"She's not-" Luca drew an unsteady breath. "I don't think it's her fault. Not entirely. The Sirin I know wants balance, not this. If I had been there, if I had listened, and trusted her-"

"You can't blame yourself," Cereza said.

"No. But I can stop her."

"Stop her?" Cereza said.

"I can help her."

"Luca, she tossed you overboard. We all saw her in An Gholam." She shook her head. "Don't you see? I was wrong to trust her, to urge you to do the same. She was our friend, and she betrayed us. I don't know if-"

"If what? If she can be helped? If she can be saved?" Luca looked from her, to Lapin, to Azare. The Witchhunter stared back, his eyes narrow, his gaze steady and dark. "Damn what you think, all of you. I'm going after her."

"No!" Cereza cried. "I'm not going to stand here and let you go off to die- I can't lose you, Luca, I can't-"

"I don't have time for this. Where's Niive?" Luca stood, and his head spun. He was still sun-drunk, exhausted. That couldn't be helped. He braced himself on the chair until he felt strong enough to stay upright on his own, then pointed toward Azare's cabin. "And can I borrow that coat?"

"You think you can help her?" Azare said.

Luca blinked.

"Do you?" Azare asked.

Luca met his eyes, so like Sirin's. Of course. Azare knew her mercy, too. Luca held the Witchhunter's gaze and faced him fully for the first time, no bars or bonds between them.

"Yes," he said.

Azare lowered his head, coppery hair gleaming in the lamplight. Lapin drew breath to protest; Azare held up his hand and she fell silent. Even Cereza said nothing, though her eyes shone, her hands in fists, both of them clenched over her heart as if in memory of the curse.

"Then you can borrow that coat," Azare told Luca. "I won't stop you."

Outside, Niive stood at the bow, keeping the winds steady around the Mistfox. The sky had melted into sunset, the sun a burning circle half-descended behind the horizon, but the light was strange, slantwise and colorless. A hazy mist turned the choppy waves dark as squid ink.

Cold touched Luca's face, and he flinched, blinking in surprise. Snow filled the air, flurries of dancing white, encrusting the Mistfox's deck, dusting the rigging and sails, already freezing into fantastical patterns across gunwales and railing.

Luca exhaled, his breath visible in the air. He shrugged deeper into the fur lining of his borrowed coat and approached Niive.

"It's changing," she said quietly as he came up behind her.

"Is this the Leviathan's work?"

She nodded. Snowflakes netted her long, black hair, but she seemed to feel no cold. The wind currents shifted around Luca as she drew her hands through the air, a taut flexion of pressure and temperature.

"You've seen it," she said. "The plague of crystal, the storms, the death it leaves behind. It is an arc unfinished. No life grows from death."

She paused. "I know what you're planning, Valere."

"Then you know I have to follow Sirin."

"And when you do, if you find her?"

Luca's throat tightened.

"I have to help her," he said. "Will you take me there?"

Niive was quiet for a time, watching the snow, watching the choppy waves past the Mistfox's bow. Luca saw her age, then, saw it in her eyes, the centuries, the longing like a cry.

"All I knew of my people were songs, stories. Whispers, half-remembered. Scraps and rags, precious nonetheless," she said at last. "My mother, singing me to sleep with lies of glory and lost power. All these long years of wandering solitude I believed so hard in what I thought I was, the identity that was denied me. But you brought me the truth, Valere."

A snarl edged her voice. "I hate you for it. I hate the answers you brought me to all my questions, that my beauty and power was bought with fear. Still, I cannot help but be grateful. I am myself, now. And I am no longer alone."

She turned to him, her golden eyes lucent in the haze of snowfall.

"I'll take you to Rashavir," she said. She sized him up with a flick of her eyes. "It's a long journey, but I should be able to make it with one passenger."

"When do we leave?"

"Now."

Footsteps echoed through the snow. He turned as Cereza hurried toward them. "You're taking him?" she said, her voice low.

"I am," Niive said.

Cereza clenched her teeth, as if fighting back tears. Luca thought she'd argue again, but she didn't.

"Azare gave me this for you," she said. "Take it."

She thrust it toward Luca: a sheathed knife. Its hilt was plain, the deep gray-blue of spellforged steel. Luca tasted acid in his throat, bitter and strange.

"No," he said quietly.

"Luca, take it. Please."

He took it. The cold steel stung his hands.

"What will you do?" he asked her, his voice rough.

"Something mad. It may never work. But I have to try." Cereza glanced back at Azare and Lapin and Alois, standing at the stateroom doors. "We have to try."

"I know you, Cee. I know you can do it."

"I hope so." She squeezed his hands. "And I know...I know-"

She cut off. Her lip trembled.

"Come back," she said, her voice thick with feeling.

Luca said nothing. He couldn't promise her; he couldn't lie to her. He pulled Cereza to him in a tight hug, fast and desperate, and over far too soon.

He pushed the knife deep into his pack and slung it over his shoulder, then faced Niive. Smooth as a gathering wave, she transformed. Her wings filled the sky, her long neck curving back from her keelbone, black feathers ruffled and snow-flecked like caught constellations.

Wind scoured the deck: her winds, called at her command, to bear them fast and steady. She looked down the long hook of her beak at Luca, as if in question.

He nodded and clambered onto her back, winding his hands deep into her feathers, drawing his fur collar around his face. This was cold, but soon he would be much colder. He felt the powerful beat of her heart beneath him, the hiss of her breathing, the hard pressure of the knife against his side.

I'm coming, Sirin.

I'm coming, Leviathan.

Niive lifted her wings and launched into the sky, scattering the snowfall. Luca pressed his face to her warm neck, holding on.

I'm coming.

[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 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]

✨avast ye✨

As I begin to post more original fiction online, I thought I’d toss this link to my Ko-Fi up as well. I write for the joy of it and it’s been absolutely wonderful to hear the response from the lovely folks out there. 

If ever you’ve read my works or clapped eyes on the once-in-a-blue-moon visual art I’ve sent out into the aether, consider flinging a few dollars my way (or doubloons, or drachma, or large discs of polished abalone shell, or lei, or whatever you have in your pockets). It would mean the world to me and would allow me to continue updating and writing!

https://ko-fi.com/lucytroutscout

Take a look at my original fiction, found here (finished series, in update progress):

https://books-of-the-great-leviathan.tumblr.com/

https://archiveofourown.org/series/2947155

Or if you’re a Resident Evil Village enjoyer, here’s some juicy fic (saints of warding series, Burial):

https://archiveofourown.org/users/toothybeastie

All for FREE…that’s right, get it while it’s hot.

Thanks again, and shares/reblogs warm my dead heart!

Some pictures of dragons below the break jff:

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