“Hold on now,” Detan said as Coss grabbed the cloth at the back of his neck and shoved him forward. “I demand to speak with your captain for being so rudely manhandled.”
“I’m sure your treatment will break her heart.” Coss kept on herding Detan along, Tibs loping beside them with his hands stuffed in his pockets. “You’ll find your flier has been safely stowed at this fine dock, though how you’ll pay to get her back is your problem.”
“This is absurd,” Detan protested, digging his heels in to slow the stocky man down. “Never mind Pelkaia’s thrice-cursed pride. I’m offering her real benefit, a trade of skill.”
Coss hesitated, his grip loosened a touch. “Not my decision,” he said, and Detan suppressed a grin. Maybe it wasn’t Coss’s decision outright, but he’d bet his shoeless feet that the first mate had a healthy say in the dealings of the Larkspur.
“Not to mention the–” He cut himself off, faking a nervous glance around for eavesdroppers, and whispered, “the list.”
“What list?” Coss asked, voice pitched low though he kept on pushing Detan toward the slanted gangplank.
“Of deviants, of course. Ones the empire’s got a sideways eye stuck on.”
“You have this list?”
“Personally? No. But I need Pelkaia’s help to free the woman who does.”
Coss mulled that over, sucking on his teeth so hard his cheeks grew sunken. “Orders are orders,” he eventually said, but there was a hesitance there that gave Detan a small tingle. He doubted Pelkaia would get much peace from her first mate tonight.
As they reached the gangplank, Coss gave him a final shove. Detan stumbled and nearly lost his footing on the rough slip of wood. With the plank groaning under their combined weight, Detan and Tibs hurried down to the dust-coated rooftop.
A chill breeze washed over them, smelling of brine and something deeper, something loamy. Heat rose across his scarred back, the crew’s gazes boring into him as he disembarked. He spun around before taking the last step and saw them there, scattered across the deck and the rigging, not bothering to obscure their stares.
Pelkaia stood at the helm, her long back straight as a mast pole, her hard stare pointed his direction. Ripka’s posture, he mused, and wondered how much of the watch-captain’s habits Pelkaia couldn’t shake from all that time she’d spent imitating her in Aransa. He gave her a cheery wave.
“See you soon, Pelly!” he called, high and bright as he could, and was rewarded with a few nervous chuckles from her crew. And a certain finger raised in salute from Pelkaia.
“Lovely,” Tibs muttered as they hopped down onto the roof.
“Oh, pah. She’ll come around. I doubt that first mate of hers will give her much choice.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Detan shrugged, surveying their new surroundings. The flier was tied up alongside the Larkspur, its rectangular deck and tubular buoyancy sack rather dinky in the shadow of the greater ship’s sleek hull. Detan looked twice at the Larkspur. The ship he knew he’d flown in on looked nothing like the ship he’d stolen in Aransa. Sure, the masts were the same, and the bowsprit featuring an angry air-serpent looked mighty familiar, but its body had changed. It looked flattened, plain. Like nothing more than an overgrown Valathean transport vessel.
He whistled low in appreciation. When the ship had come rushing in to pluck him off the cliff’s edge, he hadn’t gotten a solid look at it, and he certainly hadn’t been able to see much better locked up in one of the cabins. Whoever Pelkaia had on board making the ship look boring, they were doing a mighty fine job. Clever, he thought, filing that trick away for later.
Over the edge of the building, the streets bustled with locals going about their daily chores. Across the narrow lane, about three stories up, Detan spied an open window with a sign pinned above that read: Lotti’s Cards and Pleasures. Beige curtains had been pulled back to let the air in, and they twisted in the sea breeze. Loud whoops sounded from within, glasses clinked, and a handful of men in the crisp white shirts of the Valathean Fleet sat hunched around a table with fans of cards in their hands.
“I think,” Detan said, slinging an arm around Tibs’s shoulders to point him toward the window, “we should go make some new friends, seek some new pleasures. What do you say?”
Tibs eyed Detan’s bare feet and torn trousers. “I say we’d better get you dressed, first.” He wrinkled his nose. “And a bath wouldn’t go amiss.”
Chapter Five
Pelkaia leaned against the cabin’s exterior wall, watching Detan and Tibs make their way to a ladder at the roof’s edge, and breathed easy. She’d never been so relieved to be free of a passenger before. She caught herself drumming her fingers against her thigh and stopped. No matter what stories he told – possibly especially because of the stories he told – Detan wasn’t a soul she could trust, not like the rest of her well-vetted crew.
Jeffin slunk up alongside her, the lanky man’s face sallow in the seashore sun. A tiara of sweat gleamed across his forehead, and the crescents beneath his eyes looked bruised and sunken. “Begging your pardon, captain, but should we shove off? I’m, ah, getting rather tired.”
Glancing at the sun’s angle, Pelkaia clapped him on the back and nodded. “We’re going to put in here for the night. As soon as it gets full dark, drop your mirrors. In fact, you can try and pass them onto Laella, if you think she’s up for it.”
A frown flitted across Jeffin’s already drawn face. He crossed his heart with the old Catari constellation for strength. His lineage was nearly as tangled in Catari blood as Pelkaia’s, though he seemed to harbor a deeper loyalty than she did. The man still said prayers to the stars every night, while Pelkaia was lucky if she remembered to cross her heart with the constellations once a week, no matter her full-blooded body.
No matter her childhood in the dusty oases, hiding like stonerabbits in the badlands from the advance of the Valathean Fleet.
“I’ll show her how,” Jeffin said. His voice sounded like it was tumbling out over hard stones. Forced as his helpfulness was, she was grateful for it, and she gave his shoulder a small squeeze. Valathean, Catari. They were all deviant selium sensitives. They were all outcasts, in their own way. She and Jeffin would just have to get used to the Valathean girl’s presence.
Coss approached her, his slate-grey eyes bright and a strange tension in the tendons of his jaw.
“Ho, captain,” he said, but there wasn’t as much affection in it as usual. Jeffin tucked his head to the first mate and, sensing Coss’s agitation as surely as Pelkaia did, scampered off in a rush to find Laella.
“Ho, mate,” she said, drawing out the word “mate”. Coss rewarded her with a soft flush and shifted his weight.
“May we talk in quarters?” he asked.
Pelkaia surveyed her ship. Essi was up the ropes, getting a lesson from Old Ulder on proper knot-tying, and Jeffin had disappeared into the cabins to find Laella. The others lounged about, trading stories and drinks in Petrastad’s sea breeze. Watching them now, she could not help but imagine her son, Kel, amongst them. He had been a simple sel-sensitive, the kind the empire approved of. But even that had not been enough to keep him safe from the power struggles between Valathea and their once-commodore, Thratia. He’d died in Aransa for being a witness to Thratia’s treachery. Someday, with the help of this crew, she would balance those scales.