Fine.The god relented.You’ll come around.
Gabe came back together like a thunderclap, the atmosphere rending to give him space where there’d been none before. It took him a moment to realize he was in the foyer of the boardinghouse, slumped just inside the door. It took him another moment to realize Malcolm was staring at him, mouth agape, a cup of tea dangerously close to dropping from his hand.
“What in every hell happened to you?” he asked. Though the panic in his eyes and the wariness in his voice said he knew. Said he was waiting to see if he was still himself, or Hestraon.
“It’s me,” Gabe said. “And I think I know where Eoin is keeping the Fount piece.”
He shared the news quickly: the Brother who’d followed him from the library, the odd door in the wall beneath the Rotunda soldered closed.
Malcolm was already rushing to find Val and Mari before Gabe finished speaking. “We have to go check our ship.”
“What makes you think that?”
“If Eoin is having you followed to make sure you don’t go anywhere he doesn’t want you to, do you really think he’d leave an open means of escape?”
Ten minutes, and they all were running to the dock.
Val was the first to realize something was wrong. She stopped, breath heaving, brows knit. “This is where we left it, right?”
Farramark harbor wasn’t as extensive as the one in Dellaire. Only a handful of docks, and the one where they’d left the ship was decidedly empty.
Rage burned in Gabe’s chest, in his palms. He turned to the low wooden fence dividing the harbor from the dunes and landed a punch square on one of the supports.
The whole thing went up in flames.
Footnotes
1 Collectiveweonly appears in first editions of the Tracts, later changed to singularI.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LORE
Do not let yourself be lulled: The first calm is the eye of a storm, not its ending.
—FromSailing Lessonsby George Merrou, Auverrani naval captain, 465 AGF
It took Dani longer than either of them would have liked to find a boat. They probably should have expected it—it wasn’t like there was much need for sailing vessels in the Harbor—but after a day of compulsory gardening once Sersha found them, they were even more on edge with each other than before.
When Lore was finished and caked in dirt, she went to Raihan, fiddling with his silver instruments, carefully fielding questions about her days in the Citadel. Despite the fact that they’d each tried to steal from the other and that she’d threatened his life, they were companionable. Raihan knew what it was like to live on the run. Lore knew what it was like to be desperate for answers that wouldn’t come. They weren’t friends, but a friendship could grow, given time.
So she felt incredibly stupid for not thinking of taking Raihan’s boat before Dani did.
On their second night in the Harbor, Lore crept into the hut after moonrise, hoping that maybe the other woman wasn’t there. No such luck—she was pacing back and forth over the rough floor, and when she looked up, there was fire in her eyes. “So when were you going to tell me you’d gotten cozy with the Ferryman?”
“When I decided it was your business. So, never.”
“You idiot,” Dani hissed. “You let me spend a day looking for a damn boat when you could just convince him to let us take his?”
Her mouth opened for a poison retort, then closed again. It wasn’t really a bad idea.
“You didn’t think of that?” Dani tilted her head with a sneer. “It’s really a wonder you survived in the Citadel for so long.”
“He won’t give it to us,” Lore said. “He needs it for rescuing escapees.” Part of the reason it hadn’t occurred to her was because she knew Raihan would say no. They’d spoken of the work he did, how important it was to him to provide a way out of the Isles to those who wanted one.
“He does that maybe once every two months,” Dani said, crossing her arms. “The rest of the time, it’s just sitting there. Tell him we need it. To save the world, or some shit.”
Which was why Lore was here again on their second morning in the Harbor, hoping Raihan would lend them his boat.
