The metal man in the river was a perfect match for Shae’s mood. A heavy mountain fog had settled in over the rolling waters, but she could still see the thing standing there, waist-deep in its cold flow, frozen mid-stride. Same as ever. The aluman had gone where it wasn’t meant to go, and now it was stuck there.
Just like her.
Little rocks, beaten to smoothness by the water, lined the river’s edge. Shae squatted down and pushed her fingers through them. At last, she found one she liked. Round and flat. Just the right size. She picked it up and balanced it in her grip. Like the air, it was cold in a way things never were in the Fair Isles. She stood, thought for a moment about how the stone’s chill seemed to lessen against her skin but would, after she’d thrown it, leave her hand colder when it was gone. Then, cocking back her arm, she spun it over the stream. It bellied off the placid area behind a rock where fish liked to feed, skipped into the air, and plinked into the aluman’s face.
The metal made a hollow ring. It didn’t move.
Same as ever.
A dog barked in the village that spread out along the river behind her. It was a lonely, disembodied sound in the fog, and it did not improve her spirits.
Shae took her time gathering up a few more stones—time was one thing she had in abundance now—then she sat down on a wide boulder that stuck out from the riverbank. Below her feet, a few brown-backed minnows darted anxiously in a shallow eddy.
Watching the fish twist and turn—free to move yet not free to leave their little pocket of water—she felt a rising anger, not for the first time, that Kayden Mar had taken her aboard the Windborn airship as it had fled from the Spire. She was the Bone Pirate, by the gods. She belonged in a ship upon the warm blue sea, a world away from this cold stone seat.
In the first days, when she’d realized what he’d done, how he’d brought her across the uncrossable ocean to his home, she’d screamed out the rage.
Now, months later, helpless, she skipped another stone across the water.
It hit the same spot on the aluman’s frozen face. Perhaps a little harder than the first one, though it made no difference. The stone tumbled down into the water and disappeared. If she ever ran out of rocks to throw, Shae knew there were hundreds of them now piled around the metal man’s feet.
She would’ve died. That was the truth of it. Mabaya’s magick had choked the life out of her. She’d been minutes from the Mother’s Embrace. But Kayden had used the handcannon she’d found and thrown to him. He’d killed the old evoker, and by taking her aboard the airship, he’d been able to save Shae’s life. For all that, she was now a prisoner among his people, the Windborn, and all this damnable solid land. And the worst of it was that a part of her felt like she owed him for it.
The next stone made a very loud sound indeed.
“Thought I’d find you here.”
Shae had already cocked back her arm to throw the next rock. She paused on hearing Kayden’s voice, squeezing the stone in her hand as if it were clay that she could mold through her fingers. But like the frozen aluman, it didn’t change. She took a breath, then spun the rock out into the fog. It hit the water and immediately sank.
“Ta’moa’s tit,” she cursed.
“Sorry,” Kayden said. His voice was quiet, so very different from the tone of authority he’d had when she’d first met him aboard his airship. He’d been a captain then, a commanding presence with the mysterious power of the twin handcannons at his hips.
But of course, that was before he’d had to blow up his airship to keep it from falling into her hands. Before he’d let his crew die.
“You were right,” she said. “I’m here.” She stared out at the spot where the stone had disappeared. Keeping her voice flat and calm was harder than it ought to have been.
“Yeah,” he said.
She didn’t turn around, didn’t look back up the bank to where he’d be standing. Instead, she rummaged through the stones at her side until she found another that felt right.
“I remember when that one came,” he finally said.
Shae didn’t need to ask what he was talking about. Even if the fog hadn’t seemingly cut off the rest of the world, the aluman dominated the otherwise-quiet stretch of river; the half of it that still rose above the water seemed almost as tall as a woman. On a far warmer day, months ago, she’d swum over to it, gone under the water to examine it. She’d seen that its feet—if she was going to compare the metal thing to a woman’s anatomy—were strangely long, and that it actually stood on a wide pad of clawed metal that might’ve passed for toes. In all, its plated legs looked, she thought, like the strong hind legs of a horse, built for both power and springing speed. The Bone Pirate who’d raised her had taught her to go for her enemy’s joints in a fight—“Attack the knees,” the old woman had often growled—but the aluman wasn’t a woman. Its joints were like thick hinges, metal on metal between the shields of its thighs and shins. Its body was short compared to its legs. Like a plated fish, it was covered in a series of interlocking metal sheets that grew outward with its thickening chest, building up to armored shoulders that were just wider than the extended joints of its massive hips. Its arms were long enough to reach its knees, and they ended in hands with two fingers and two thumbs. What passed for its head, staring sightless at them, seemed half as big as it should’ve been, and it was sunk down into its shoulders. It had two circles of glass where its eyes ought to have been, and holes and a slotted metal grill for its nose and mouth. Looking at its face, it seemed almost a mockery of a woman’s. Like a metal skull.
As Shae stared out at it, she heard Kayden scrambling down the embankment, getting closer. “How long ago?” she asked.
“It was … ten years now, I think.” His boots crunched the dirt and stones. “I never told you about it?”
Shae shook her head. “You didn’t.”
“Used to be a couple of farms on that side of the river.” His voice seemed more confident now that he knew what he was going to say. “We’d spent a few months digging new ditches to get the water around them, but the ditches weren’t finished yet. A couple of families decided to move over there anyway, though. Young couples, newly married. They couldn’t wait to get started in their new lives together.”
Shae, staring out into the fog beyond the aluman, nodded her head. Marriage was a new concept for her. There were no such compacts among the Seaborn, much less between the women of her pirate crew, but she was pretty sure she understood it now. She’d even ceased shuddering when she saw men and women together in the village—or when she saw how Kayden would look at her sometimes.
“Anyway, the aluman came in the night,” Kayden continued. “We eventually tracked the path it took. Figured out it had swung down from the Gap and been turned back by the defenses on the road across the Greensward. It doubled back for some reason, came up the valley toward town.”
Still holding the rock she’d picked up, Shae narrowed her eyes at the massive thing in the water. “No one saw it?”
Kayden walked out onto her boulder and shifted his holstered handcannons so he could sit down just a couple of feet away. He sighed, and his breath came out in its own fog—something else that was new to her. “Didn’t see many alumen around Felcamp back then. So the town wasn’t really keeping watch. Alumen were still mostly on the other side of the Pillars.”
The Pillars. Shae instinctively looked up from the river, but the thick fog blocked her view of the distant peaks to the east. They were there, though, a long chain of them, jagged and sharp as sharks’ teeth, taller than anything Shae had ever seen. Not even the Mother’s Mount reached so high into the clouds. If Kayden’s airship hadn’t carried her over them, she’d have believed that they held up the sky.
Kayden started to reach over to take one of the stones from the pile she’d made, then stopped. “May I?”
His uncertainty made her turn to look at him. When she’d first met him, he’d been wearing a crimson shirt, emblazoned with the symbols of his command. But he wasn’t a captain anymore. He looked little different from most of the men in Felcamp: woolen trousers, leather boots, a furred coat over a brown, hooded tunic. He’d probably had the hood pulled up against the cold as he’d looked for her; pulling it back had left his dark hair in need of a comb. The fog around them made his skin seem paler than usual, but it set his dark eyes into sharp contrast.
He tried a smile, and though the corners of his mouth hinted at the brash man he’d been, his dark eyes expected failure—and were too ready to accept it.
She hesitated, then held out the stone she already had in her hands. She told herself it was weighted wrong for her fingers.
Kayden took it with genuine relief, then skipped it over into the chest of the aluman. The clang set the dog in town barking again.
Shae frowned and quickly picked up another stone. She threw it, and hers hit too.
“Nice one,” Kayden said.
“Did it kill many people?” Shae asked.
Kayden looked back to the aluman. He swallowed hard. “Three. Could’ve been worse. A lumicker happened to be working on the lines guarding the bridge that night. With those down, the aluman could’ve walked right into town, killed us all. Thank the gods it tried to cross the river instead.”
“They’re not very smart.”
“I’m fine with that.”
They sat for a while. The water made hollow, tinny sounds as it ran around the waist of the dead aluman. Shae could see how the fog was clinging to its cold silver skin, rolling and coalescing into rivulets that ran down to fall from the sharper joints. “Did you see it that night?” she finally asked.
“Folks knew when the screaming started. The bells were ringing. My father and I were with some of the first men across the bridge, and we saw it coming out of one of the farmhouses. It ripped the farmer in two. As easy as you or I would pull meat from the bone.”
“They’re that strong?”
Kayden didn’t answer. When she turned to look at him, she saw that he was staring out into the fog beyond the aluman.
“What—?”
He held up his hand. “Shhh. Listen.”
Her heart skipped a beat. As she turned to follow his gaze across the river, she expected to hear footsteps, heavy and hard upon the earth. Her hand instinctively went to the two halves of the blowreed pipe that hung beside the spyglass on her belt—the only objects of her former life that had crossed the sea with her—despite knowing that the poisoned fangs, which had been so effective as darts in pirate raids, would be useless against an aluman.
But then she heard the sound more clearly. A humming, low and steady. A sound she knew, or thought she should know.
Kayden stood, and she did too. He looked up into the foggy air.
The needle point of an airship pierced the cloudy banks of fog, and its long, sleek body seemed to push through the widening opening it had made. It loomed over them, and the wooden ship that was slung beneath it came into view. A moment later, the cloud roiled as the spinning blades along its sides cut free of the fog. Its engines, like everything else powered by the lumick technology of the Windborn, glowed pale blue. Beyond the hum of the blades, Shae could now hear the calls of the men upon the airship’s deck, wearing uniforms like the one Kayden had once worn.
Kayden’s neck craned as it passed over them. He suddenly gasped. “Gods, it’s from Silverhall.”
“How do you—?”
“The silver lines.” He pointed, and she now saw that there were three bands of silver slashed across the side of the wooden hull.
“The silver means it comes from Silverhall?”
“It means it belongs to the king,” Kayden said. He shook his head as if waking from a dream. He turned and hurried off the boulder. “We’ll need to go,” he said over his shoulder. “They’ll land at the mooring field, which won’t leave a lot of time to make the house presentable for him. Gods, Mother is probably already screaming at the servants.”
He was almost to the rise of the embankment when he stopped and looked back to her. She hadn’t moved. “It’s the king,” he said. He walked back. “He’s going to want to see you.”
“See me?” In the first months, many of the Windborn had pressed her for details on her life in the Fair Isles. They saw her as the enemy, a source of information. But for all that they might’ve wanted to, they’d never tortured her. Kayden’s father, Lord Mar, had pointedly put her under his protection. She was grateful, but she’d always known his protection only went as far as his authority. The lord of Felcamp answered to the king in Silverhall, and if the king should want to do something more with her …
Kayden seemed to read her thoughts. “It’s going to be all right. You’ve got to trust me.”
And she’d never given them much information. Certainly not what they would’ve wanted. Whether they believed her or not, she told them the truth: she didn’t know the inner workings of the Seaborn court. She didn’t know their politics or their aims or their response to the Windborn airships. She was a pirate, nibbling on the edges of society. She knew as much of the Seaborn as a shark needed to know of a pod of seals: how to survive by finding and picking off the weak ones.
“Shaesara.” Kayden held out his hand to her. “You must trust me.”
She knew there was nowhere she could run, nowhere else she could go. She knew, too, that Kayden would want to protect her, that no matter what was going to happen, he was going to try. And that, she thought, was at least better than swimming without a shore in sight. “I trust you,” she said.
She reached out and took his hand. And when he looked into her eyes, she tried to smile in the way she thought he would like—tried to smile like it was actually true.