‘What are we doing, Bueralan?’
‘You’re the one who agreed to a biographer, not me.’ In the nearly empty bar, he pointed at Heast with a pint of watered-down beer. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you’ve decided to adopt a child.’
‘Did you get notes from Muriel?’ With a shake of his head, the Captain of Refuge glanced around the bar. Bueralan knew what he saw: a small, rundown box on the edge of Neela, near the closed bridge to Mesi. The tables were mismatched, items scavenged from the city and the shore, and often stolen. Tables were propped up with small barrels, chairs were casks of home-brewed wine, and if there was a clean mug or glass, it was clean only because the previous drinker had wiped it out. Two men sat at the front eating food they had got from the wake – the noise of it was a dull roar inside – while the woman who stood behind the bar had an eyepatch over one eye. ‘What are you doing in here?’ Heast asked, turning back to him. ‘You’re using my coin, you could be where Refuge is.’
‘I like it here.’ He didn’t, not really. ‘I thought it would be a place to drink seriously in.’
‘This is more water than beer.’
‘Yeah.’ Bueralan looked at his pint, put it on the table and shrugged. ‘I feel run out,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t even know how I got here.’
‘By boat,’ Heast said drily.
Bueralan had ridden to Jeil with the survivors of the Battle of Ranan. Most took him to be a soldier with Refuge because Heast had given him the order to mount up. The Brotherhood, the Saan and the Faaishans made him a space in the lines, thinking that he had suffered a trauma, that he was gone emotionally. Maybe he was. Zean was dead. Taela, Orlan, Kae, Ruk, Liaya and Aerala. Pueral, the First Queen. Even Aela Ren was dead. Bueralan had seen more than enough death. By the time he reached the port, he realized his entire world had been reduced to two grey horses, one of which, he was fairly sure, was beginning to view him as a liability. By the time Heast had booked a ship to Yeflam, Bueralan was considering giving the horses to him and moving on.
But he had come to Yeflam instead. He had come to Neela, to where the Lady of the Ghosts made her new home, to where her husband was dying, and he found the worst inn he could find and took a room.
‘Did I tell you someone tried to steal my horse the other day?’ he said, the noise of the wake rising behind him, like a swell, before subsiding. ‘It was this thin pale guy. He came up to complain that he had been bitten. The horse had torn his ear off. He just had this bloody mess where it had been. Kept telling me that I had to help him, that it was my fault for having such a bad horse.’
‘Bueralan,’ Heast began.
‘I told him, I said: Did you touch him—?’
‘Bueralan.’
The saboteur sighed. ‘What do you want to hear?’ he asked. ‘There’s nothing left. I feel that. I can’t even find it in me to get drunk.’
‘I have a job.’
‘There are no more jobs.’
‘There’s always more,’ Heast said. ‘Or there’s a short walk into Leviathan’s Blood.’
It would kill him, he was sure of that. He could throw himself off the edge and sink into the darkness, in water tainted by blood.
Instead, he took a drink of his beer.
‘You want this job,’ the Captain of Refuge said, picking up his pint. ‘It is in Illate. Before the First Queen of Ooila died, she had me make two promises. One was to see Aela Ren dead, the other was to finish what Refuge started in Illate. She told me that she had been working towards Illate’s independence and she wanted us to finish it.’
Despite himself, Bueralan was surprised. He hadn’t heard any rumours of anything remotely tied to Illate despite the weeks he had ridden with Refuge. He had heard about Ayae’s duel with Aela Ren, about the dead returning to Heüala, the City of the Dead, and he had heard that the Saan had been led by the rulers of the Five Kingdoms. Jye Tuael was, reportedly, claiming that the entire assault on Ranan was his idea. He even heard that Heast planned to offer Kal Essa and the remains of the Brotherhood positions within Refuge if his new lieutenant agreed.
But he had heard nothing about Illate.
‘I need someone to represent Refuge in the courts of the Queens of Ooila,’ Heast continued. ‘I can’t send Lehana. I can’t send anyone from the Queen’s Guard. The other day they were given a letter, branding them as traitors. They each have bounties on their heads for not returning with their Queen. Rumour has it that they’re being blamed for her death. But even if that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t send them in. Lehana is a soldier. The court is no place for her. It’s not for me, either.’
‘You think it’s a place for me?’
‘I think the Baron of Kein will thrive there.’
Bueralan took another drink of watered beer. He let it run through him, let Heast’s statement run through him. ‘You’re serious?’ he said, after a moment.
‘Yes. But it won’t happen tomorrow, or next week. Refuge needs to rebuild. We’re taking in Essa and his soldiers, but we need more. We’re going to sail to Leviathan’s End at the end of the week.’
‘You are serious.’
‘It’s what Refuge does.’
Bueralan did not lie to himself: the offer did appeal. A part of him responded to it. The part of him, he knew, that had stopped him from drinking himself blind, from walking off the edge of Neela, from staying in Ranan. It was the part of him that Zean, Taela and the rest of Dark sat in. It was maybe even the part that Orlan and Ren sat in. In the near-empty bar, he closed his eyes and saw the dark, winged child Taela had given birth to, the creature that had known it was Zean, even as it rejected the knowledge. ‘It’s what Refuge does,’ he said, quoting the man before him. ‘But is that what Aned Heast does, now?’
‘Yes.’ The Captain of Refuge looked into the mug before him and then pushed it away. ‘You and I, we have both worked for people we don’t like. We try not to, but sometimes you need what is being offered, and you do the work, regardless. It’s no different from what a lot of people do. But the difference for you and me is that when we do something we don’t like, someone dies. Mostly they die wrongly. They die because they don’t have the coin to pay us. They don’t have the status. They don’t have the privilege. Well, Refuge is for those people. The Captain of Refuge represents the people who cannot represent themselves. Maybe I forgot about that while I wasn’t the captain, but I won’t forget now.’
‘You didn’t forget,’ Bueralan said. ‘You never chipped away at your soul, selling bits and pieces of it.’
‘But you did.’ Heast didn’t say it politely. ‘You did it long before you came to Mireea, though you tried not to.’
‘I was never part of Refuge. I was a saboteur. I never had that option.’
‘It’s here for you now.’
Was it?
It was his choice, and his alone. Bueralan could say no. Heast would finish his drink, stand, and walk out. He’d never see him again. He could sell his two horses, buy a ride somewhere out of Yeflam, find a job that meant little to him and wear away the hours, days, and weeks until he walked into Leviathan’s Blood, or died of old age. Bueralan was sure his body would get old, sure that it would begin to fail: sure, but not positive. He didn’t know if being god-touched meant that he could no longer die quietly in his sixties or eighties, full of regrets and haunted by memories.
‘This beer is awful,’ Bueralan said, finally. He put it back on the table. ‘I think it might be the worst beer I’ve ever had.’
‘There’s better beer where Refuge is staying. Grab your stuff. Get your two mean horses. We can go through the wake on the way there, get some food, then get something real to drink.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, before he thought otherwise about it, before he talked himself into staying on the cask of wine he was using as a seat. ‘Yeah, let’s do that, then.’