As astonishing as they’d been from the air, the Pillars of the Sky were far more extraordinary from the ground. As the great mountains had grown closer, rising higher with every turn of the lumicker wagon’s wheels, Shae had given a lot of thought to how she would describe them to her fellow pirates back in the Bay of Bones.
Picture an axe, she’d finally decided, driven through a plank. The blade blasted through the wood as hard and deep as a woman could drive it. Picture it stuck there. Now turn it over, blade to the sky. The plank, she would tell them, was the earth. The wall of that axe blade, sharp edge to the sky, was the line of the Pillars.
Now deep into the mountains, she still thought it was a good image, though the reality was that the Pillars were hardly a single wall. They were mountains rooted in mountains, an axe edge notched and chipped into a hundred great knives all pointed at the stars.
Ever since they’d left the open expanse of the Greensward, the road to the Blue Keep had been steadily climbing into those knives, twisting its way into them, higher and higher—a line of white-dusted gravel along loosely treed valley bottoms between the blades of the peaks and the noise of a tumbling river. For all the ice that clung to the mountainsides and the snow that covered their feet, the cascading water was still unfrozen.
Sitting beside Aro Lanser on the bench seat of his wagon, Shae shivered and pulled her wool-swaddled hands to her mouth to blow heat onto them.
“Told you to get full gloves,” Aro said. “Fingerless gloves lead to fingertip-less fingers when winter comes this high up.”
“So you’ve told me,” Shae said. “And I told you that I feel better when I’m able to use my fangs.”
Aro humphed at that, then moved the wagon team’s reins to one hand so he could fish out a pipe with the other. “Ah, well, thank your gods we’ve had them at the ready.”
Shae tried to glare at him, though she knew he was right. Not once in the many days they’d been together had anyone so much as shot a disapproving glance at the lumicker and the company he kept. What Kayden had said about how much people feared their weapons was true. Passing through some towns, she’d even seen people afraid to look the old man in the eye.
Aro passed her the reins, then used two hands to stuff his pipe with bits of loamy black weed before he pulled a metal cylinder from his pocket. A fire starter, he called it. Shae had seen Kayden use one to light the firepowder that destroyed his airship, and she’d stolen it from him. She watched Aro cup his hands around the bowl of the pipe, then pass the cylinder over it. The weed sparked to life, and he puffed it to health before pocketing the starter and taking back the reins. “Truth be told, I reckon you could use those fangs to get these hags moving faster, though.”
Shae wasn’t sure if he meant it as a joke or not, though it was true. The slivers of metal would put a kick in the animals’ steps if they stuck into their backsides. Unless she dipped them in killing or sleeping poison, of course. And from this distance, she wouldn’t even have to use her blowreed. She could pinch the fang between her first two fingers and fling it home.
“Thinking about it, aren’t you?” Aro asked. He was smiling between the clenched teeth on his pipe.
Shae sighed, then nodded toward the river in the snowy valley. “Everything else is frozen. Why not that?”
“Hard to freeze moving water. Dead of winter, it’ll go solid, though.”
“You’ve been up here in winter?”
Aro puffed, nodded. “Been just about everywhere at every time, I think. But I’m glad to go back.”
That the lumicker had decided to take her and Kayden to the Blue Keep had been a surprise. At first, he’d only agreed to take them to Homilden—he said he had business in that direction anyway—but once he’d gotten them to the town, he’d announced that his business, in fact, was at the Blue Keep itself.
It was quickly clear that the older man was simply too fascinated by her to leave. After that first night, when he’d learned the truth of what she was, there seemed to be no end to his questions about the Fair Isles and her place within them.
What were the Fair Isles like? Islands in a warm ocean, she decided.
Was the mask she wore as the Bone Pirate made from a real human skull? The front of one, yes.
What did the Bay of Bones look like? Like a river falling from a forest into a huge stone bucket with the ocean at the bottom.
Were there truly no men among her pirates? No, because cocks aren’t useful for piracy.
On and on it went.
And, to his credit, he was more than happy to answer her questions too. Shae learned a great deal about the lumickers that “Shae of Felcamp” ought to have known. It was true that Aro didn’t have a home beyond the wagon. No lumicker did. He’d been born in a small town called Crippledove, the fifth son of a fifth son of a farmer. Nothing about that made him special, but it did mean that he’d inherit the smallest share of his grandfather’s small share. So Aro left, and time and chance—he was vague on the specifics but particular in his wording—brought him to Blackleaf, the Lumickers College. They took him in as someone to help in the kitchens, but he worked his way into an apprenticeship and then into a wagon of his own. He’d been making his random way through the land ever since. Lumickers, he explained, were like fallen leaves pushed about by the wind. The threat of the alumen meant there was always lumick work to be done somewhere. Locals paid them for repairs or for upgrades, if a lumicker had figured out something new that could be done with the crystals and the aluman parts.
Something new was, near as Shae could tell, his life’s mission. Whenever his questions came back around to magick and what she knew of the Char, which was precious little, she suspected it was some foreign insight that he was after.
Even without such secrets from her, though, Aro claimed to be the finest lumicker in Aionia on this side of the Pillars. When she asked if there were lumickers on the other side of the Pillars, his only response was one side of his bushy grey mustache pinching in a lopsided grin.
“The Blue Keep is coming up soon,” Aro said. “Best wake him.”
Shae nodded. Sliding open the wooden half-door behind them, she peeked into the wagon’s interior. Kayden was in the bed, just below, sleeping. While her own injuries were nearly healed, he still spent most of his time asleep as his body recovered.
She turned herself around and then shimmied her legs and hips through the opening. Arching her back, she managed to land her feet on the far side of the bed. Then she lifted and pulled her upper body through. Balancing through the bumps of the road that the wagon’s mechanics couldn’t absorb, she slid the door shut and then hopped down onto the floor of the wagon.
Aro had been generous in letting Kayden take the bed while the two of them rotated their nights between the bench and floor. It was a wagon built for one, which made it painfully cramped with three. She and Aro tried to spend as much time outside as the cold would let them. Even Kayden had been trying to come out more and more, as much as he could manage before the pain grew too great or his strength simply began to give out.
He was incredibly lucky to be alive. Half his ribs had been shattered, and an arm and a leg broken. He’d taken enough blows to the head to leave him dizzy for days even after he woke up.
But Aro had set the bones well, and he’d fashioned metal braces with straps to stabilize the arm and leg: a set for sleeping, and another set with gears that helped Kayden manage what mobility his body could stand.
He’d live. He’d be her Kayden again.
Her Kayden.
Looking at him in the dark, she wondered about that. How she’d begun to think of him as belonging to her somehow. It was an uneasy feeling, but she also couldn’t deny that every time he managed to make his way down from the wagon to join her and Aro by a roadside fire, her heart whispered something that might be a song.
After hesitating for a moment, she reached out and touched his shoulder. He’d lost weight, but it was still a firm mass beneath her fingers. “Kayden,” she whispered. “Wake up.” She waited for a few seconds, then shook his shoulder more firmly. “Come on. Wake up.”
When he groaned and shook his head, Shae let go of his shoulder and quickly stepped back with her hands at her sides. “You need to get up.”
His head raised, his eyes blinking. “What?”
Shae rolled her eyes, then reached over to one of the shelves, where they’d taken to storing Kayden’s mobility braces. She grabbed the arm one first. “Aro says we’re getting close.”
Kayden yawned, nodded, and then gingerly pulled himself up into a sitting position with his good arm. The blankets fell away into his lap, exposing his bare chest with its layers of bruising.
“They’re looking better,” she said. It was true. The bruises were still bad enough to make him look like he’d gotten into a fight with cups of paint—yellow and green, black and blue—but the splotches were clearly fading.
He tested the ribs with a deep breath, winced. “Still hurts on the inside,” he said with a smile.
“Broken ribs don’t heal quick,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed beside him. “Arm out.”
Kayden helped her lift his broken arm away from his body so she could swap out the braces. “You’ve broken some?”
“Fell off the main mast beam once.” Shae smiled at the memory as she carefully tightened the brace straps. “Landed on a barrel right next to one of the skin drums. Broke three ribs. Bone Pirate told me if I’d have broken the drum, she’d have used my skin to repair it.”
“What?”
Shae blinked up at his shock. “That was a joke,” she explained.
“Good. I was going to say—”
“The drums are far too large to stretch with a child’s skin.”
She finished the last strap, then stood up and got the leg brace. When she turned around, he was staring at her, his face caught between horror and amusement. “I keep saying I won’t ever understand you. I keep hoping it won’t be true. And yet …”
Shae shrugged, and she held the leg brace out to him. “I’m the Bone Pirate,” she said, as if it were the only explanation needed. “I was dead—”
“In the beginning,” he said, completing the mantra for her. His eyes were kind, a look that seemed something like pity. “I know.”
He reached out, his hand laying over hers on the leg brace. He gripped it. She didn’t pull away.
“I just wish you’d give a shot at living too,” he said.
Shae opened her mouth to speak, but then the wagon abruptly rumbled to a halt.
“You’ll need to be coming out here,” Aro said from up front. “Best to use the back door.”
Shae nodded. Kayden was still touching her, his eyes fixed on her. “Both of us?” she asked.
“Kayden most of all. And if you could move slowly when you come on out, I’d appreciate it. We have guests.”
Kayden smiled and moved his hand to another part of the brace. She let it go and turned to a different drawer as he started strapping the brace around his broken leg. “I’ll set out some clothes,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you it’s cold out there.”