Her breath clouded in the air. She didn’t know how many there were, only that her vision was starting to blur. She tried to feel a sense of pride for hiding the ledger away. For doing as a Casimir would.Fight, love.Her fist tightened around the brass knuckles, but what good would it do? She could give one of them a bloody lip or a bloody nose, only to get her weapon ripped away.
No, if she was going to be taken away, she was going to remain armed.
Flick straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. “What do you want with me?”
Did they know who she was? Was she going to be snatched away like the other unsuspecting humans who had disappeared over the past week and been taken who knows where? Or were they here for the ledger?
“The ledger, and you can go free,” one of the men said.
There was her answer.
Flick didn’t believe them one bit.
Good girl, Jin said in her head.
She shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The men looked among themselves, and the one closest to her mimicked her shrug. “Is that right?”
Flick swallowed the fear rising up her throat, refusing to give in even as he strode closer. She took a step back, only to bump into another man behind her. She tried to duck away, then attempted to make a run for it.
But they held her fast, their gloved hands rough and unyielding.
And pulled a sack over her head.
No, no, no. She needed to find out what the tribute would truly be about. She needed to forge invites. She needed to meet Willard in the morning, to keep the ruse of the missing ship going for as long as she could. For Jin’s sake. For Arthie’s sake. For Matteo.
“We’ll jog your memory, worry not,” the same man promised.
The cloth was rough and musty, pulling her hair tight against her head and over her brow. Flick suddenly imagined others being apprehended the same way, girls like her, boys, women, men. Kidnapped for her mother to stoke false fear into the hearts of her people, and then possibly killed after. It was getting harder to breathe. To stay awake.
Flick was prodded forward, half dragged. She had the sense they were leading her away from here, but not far enough that they had to hail a carriage. What would Arthie do in this moment? Thank them for saving her the time, really.
Flick couldn’t say the words, but she tried her best to feel them.
15ARTHIE
One might not have been able to tell from the outside, but inside, Arthie was a tempest at sea. She didn’t look to the Ceylani shore when she emerged on deck. She went straight to Vane to instruct him to berth away from prying eyes. But he was one step ahead of her because he didn’t “quite like the look of the people at shore,” the ship turning as she strode toward him, forcing the island in front of her.
Her island. Her home. The sticky heat she had once attributed to her daily life was as foreign as the first time she’d set foot on Ettenia and the cold, dry air had scraped her skin. It might not have been an Ettenian climate, but the sight of the harbor could have fooled her.
There was nothing Ceylani about it.
Colonizers had torn up the trees and shanties and erected a miniature White Roaring sea port, with cargo stacked high beside branches of popular Ettenian shops. There were even a number of horse-drawn carriages in a land full of thatched bullock carts, and for what? As if they needed to be reminded of home while they pillaged and looted every resource they could find a use for.
She didn’t see a fortress and wondered for a moment if that was a worse truth, for it meant the fortress was elsewhere, that the Ettenians had constructed far more throughout the island.
Why have you returned?the sea seemed to ask her as it rushed against the sides of the ship.Why are you here?
It was so ridiculous that it was maddening. Some strange and twisted hallucination that couldn’t possibly be real. Howcouldsomeone take over another land and live guilt-free? How could they destroy and pillage and act as if it was wholly natural and their right to do so?
All she saw were Ettenians, their skin a lot less peaky and a lot more golden from the sun. She had expected it, hadn’t she? Ceylan was now an Ettenian colony, but how were there more of them than there were brown-skinned Ceylanis?
“Wicked knives, it’s hot,” Jin exclaimed as he joined her, shaded by the canopy of his umbrella. He stood close. Their earlier conversation had smoothed some of their wrinkled bond, but only time could mend the rest of it.
His lips tightened as he took in the view just as the ship completed its turn and lanky tropical trees crowded their view. Matteo was just as speechless beside him, anger pulsing at his jaw. His umbrella was a deep shade of crimson, casting a shadowed, reddish hue over his face. There was a familiarity to this moment. She’d stared into another pair of vengeful eyes before. Only this time,thisanger was stirred because ofherpain, because of how the scene before them affectedher, nothing more. It was a strange distinction, indeed.
“You will leave your mark,” he said quietly, reminding her of her own words.
