Bitter cold shrouded the Chione as she sailed around Nocturne’s southern cape and took a northerly course for the Isles of the Marakai. Ice rimed the rigging and slicked the twin masts. Even the stars above looked frozen in place. Somewhere over the western horizon, past the Great Forest and the Umbra and the mortal cities, the sun beat down on a trackless desert, but in the far reaches of the Austral Ocean its light and warmth were a distant memory. Here, the three pale queens of night reigned supreme.
In her small berth, Nazafareen curled beneath a mountain of blankets. Darius lay at her side, his breathing deep and even. He slept peacefully now, though a short while before he’d woken her with panicky mutterings, twisting and clawing at his throat. He would have drawn blood if she hadn’t pinned his hands. She spoke to him, empty, reassuring words, and he grew calmer, finally passing into normal sleep. It was a nightly ritual. He never seemed to remember when he woke and Nazafareen hadn’t told him.
Sometimes he whispered a name.
Thena.
Nazafareen’s bond with Darius broke when the Chione passed beyond the Umbra, but she didn’t need it to sense the fear contained in that single word. Thena must be the one who’d punished him with the iron collar. He still refused to speak in any detail of what had happened to him at the Temple of Apollo and Nazafareen didn’t press. But she thought often of this faceless woman, and how much she would like to meet her someday.
This invariably led to brooding about the Pythia. Her pitiless blue eyes and the bellowing shrieks of the brazen bull. Now the Oracle sought the daēva talismans, to collar and enslave them.
Captain Mafuone said they’d reach the Isles within two days. Then Kallisto would try to find a bird who knew Sakhet-ra-katme and send her a message. Apparently, Sakhet knew a great deal about the talismans, more than anyone living. Nazafareen harbored secret hopes Sakhet might know how to restore her memories too, but she kept those to herself.
During their time together on the Chione, Darius had told her more about her life before Nocturne. About a woman named Tijah, who had been their comrade in the Water Dogs, and her bonded daēva, Myrri. Nazafareen asked every question she could think of and Darius dug out scraps he thought he’d forgotten, and it all left her both intrigued and deeply bitter because it was like hearing a grand adventure story about somebody else.
The truth of their past troubled her, as he’d known it would. Before the bond broke, she felt his power and the awareness she could sever him from it if she chose to. As much as Nazafareen enjoyed the intimate connection with him, it seemed too much like a form of slavery. The cuffs were designed for the express purpose of domination. For humans to control a power not meant for them.
In the bright moonlight coming through the porthole, she studied the gold cuff circling the stump of her right wrist. It was engraved with a snarling griffin—a winged lion—and had a lock with a small keyhole. The magus who first bonded them had kept the key, though it must be long gone now. Nazafareen tucked her arm under the pillow again, snuggling against Darius’s warm body.
His left arm appeared smooth and unblemished now, but it would wither again if they entered Solis. Darius had explained how the bond took a piece of him and trapped it in the cuff, and that—plus the element of fire—was what made the bond work. Every daēva suffered a different infirmity. Some lost tongues or eyes. Others had crooked backs and twisted legs. Nazafareen scowled. It all seemed utterly barbaric.
But their bond was gone in the darklands, and so was her negatory magic. Nazafareen felt naked without it, vulnerable and exposed. Darius said it drew on the power of the void, but where did that come from? Not the Nexus. Breaking magic was an inborn trait and one so rare Nazafareen didn’t know of anyone else who had it—or what ultimately became of them.
She pondered these things as she lay in the bunk, listening to the wind in the rigging. It had blown steady for days from the south, but now she heard intermittent stronger gusts that made the sails flap madly, as if the breeze couldn’t decide which way to go. Nazafareen touched Darius’s shoulder and his blue eyes flew open, wary and tense. He unconsciously reached for his elemental power, as he always did upon waking, as if to reassure himself it was still there.
His gaze softened when he saw her. She cupped his chin and ran a thumb across the dark stubble. It had been rough when it first grew in, chafing when he kissed her, but now it felt soft and silky.
“I like you with a beard,” she said. “You look distinguished, like Herodotus.”
He frowned. “It itches. But I’m not sure I want to try shaving on the Austral Ocean. You might not like me so much with one ear.”
“I’d like you with no ears at all,” she said seriously. “But listen, Darius. I think the weather is changing.”
He sat up and looked out the porthole, studying the sea and sky.
“Storm coming,” he said softly. “A bad one, I’d reckon.”
She leaned over him and pressed her face against the thick glass. It was too dark to see much, though his daēva eyes were keener.
“How bad?” she asked.
“We ought to ask the captain,” Darius replied. “She’ll have a good sense of it.”
Nazafareen had spent hours on deck observing the Marakai sailors and was deeply impressed by their grace and agility. They seemed to anticipate every swell and gust of wind. The Chione rode the waves like a water bird, perfectly at ease. And Nazafareen found herself reveling in the salt spray cast across the bow, the rush of water beneath the hull and sense of tremendous space all around, of being a tiny speck hurtling along beneath the vast starry sky. What a wonderful life, she’d thought, to sail free on the oceans!
But now she felt the power of the coming storm and was afraid.
“Better to know what we’re getting into,” she agreed. “I only hope it doesn’t delay us too much.”
With some reluctance, Nazafareen crawled out from the blankets and donned her fur-lined cloak. Darius, who seemed indifferent to the chill, pulled a tunic on and they headed up to the deck, where they found Captain Mafuone at the bow. As they approached, a gull flew past, making hard for the west.
“Rough weather ahead, captain?” Darius called.
Nazafareen gazed out at the water. It was choppy and streaked with white spindrift, but no worse than yesterday. The skies looked clear.
Captain Mafuone turned to them, calm and commanding. She wore her hair in rows of tight braids that accentuated a high forehead and enviable cheekbones. “Do you see the moon?” She pointed at Hecate, which was surrounded by a bright yellow halo. “The corona is a sure sign. And the birds know. They’re headed for shore.” Her face grew thoughtful. “This storm, it isn’t natural. It appeared out of nowhere.”
“What does that mean?” Nazafareen asked. “Someone conjured it up with magic?”
The captain shook her head. Despite the cold, she wore a sleeveless leather vest and baggy trousers cinched at the ankles with cords of shell. The tattoo of Sat-bu, She With No Face and Many Arms, seemed to writhe as her lean biceps flexed. “I’m not sure. But we have a few hours yet to prepare. Go tell your friends to stay in their cabins.”
The crew was already reefing the sails and lashing down anything loose. They moved quickly and efficiently, each focused on the task at hand. None looked especially worried, which Nazafareen found reassuring. She threw a last glance at the sea. The wind had shifted again, driving long lines of swells from the north. In the thickening haze above, Hecate’s outline looked gauzy and indistinct. She clasped Darius’s hand and they hurried below, splitting up when they reached the companionway leading to the passenger quarters.
“What?” Megaera demanded grumpily in response to Nazafareen’s pounding. A blanket lay across her broad shoulders and her dark hair hung in a messy braid. Like Herodotus and Rhea, the lateral rolling of the ship made her ill and she’d been in a foul humor for days. Nazafareen tried not to recoil at the unpleasant aroma wafting from the small cabin.
“Storm’s coming,” she said. “Captain says everyone should prepare for rough seas.”
“Rough seas?” Megaera laughed darkly, one hand braced on the door. “What does she call this?”
“It’s going to get worse.”
An instant later, Cyrene and Charis crowded the doorway. Cyrene’s pretty almond eyes were bleary and red-rimmed. Only Charis looked alert, gripping her staff as if she expected to confront a boarding party of pirates.
Nazafareen had lived in Nocturne and easily judged time by the moons, but for her companions from Solis, the constant darkness played havoc with their natural rhythms of rest and wakefulness. As a result, some of the Maenads slept all the time and others hardly at all. The seasickness didn’t help. Nazafareen heard a loathsome retching sound from the dim recesses of the cabin that must have come from Rhea.
Lightning flickered through the porthole, though it was still far away. Down the corridor, Darius spoke in a quiet voice to Herodotus and Kallisto.
“Don’t worry,” Nazafareen said confidently, “the captain knows what she’s doing. I figured we were bound to hit bad weather eventually. Just sit tight.”
“As if we had any choice,” Megaera muttered, wincing as the ship gave a slow roll.
“Oh, quit complaining,” Charis snapped. “At least you’re not sharing a bunk with Rhea. If I’d known she had such a delicate stomach, I would have asked to sleep in the cargo hold!”
Rhea snarled something vicious from her bunk and Nazafareen used the distraction to slip away and leave them to their squabbling. She did sympathize. It must be difficult for four women to share a cabin, especially when two of them were sick half the time. Darius had offered to give his up since he spent most of his time on deck or with Nazafareen, but despite Cyrene’s constant harping, she’d chosen to stay with her sisters. Nazafareen wondered if it had to do with the twins, Adeia and Alcippe. She knew the Maenads still mourned them, as she did too. Perhaps it was a comfort to stick together.
Curiosity drew her and Darius back up to the deck. Captain Mafuone gave them a hard look but didn’t insist they go below—not yet, at least. This was her first real storm at sea, and Nazafareen wanted to see it for herself. They moved to the stern, out of the crew’s way, and leaned against the taffrail.
“How many times have you been on a ship, Darius?” she asked.
“Twice, counting this one,” he replied.
“Was there a storm?”
Darius pulled a bruised apple from his pocket and bit into it. “Not then. We crossed the Midnight Sea, but it wasn’t nearly as rough as this.” He chewed thoughtfully. “We did ride through a sandstorm in the desert once. I don’t think anything could be worse than that.”
They watched in silence as Selene crept above the horizon. In her buttery yellow light, Nazafareen could see clouds shaped like mare’s tales trailing off to the southwest. Then the wind died. The Chione sped along swiftly because the Marakai were working invisible currents in the water, although the air felt thick and oppressive.
“Perhaps the storm turned away from us,” she said to Darius.
He shook his head. “This is the prelude,” he said quietly.
And of course, he was right. Within an hour, an impenetrable blackness covered the northern horizon. One by one, the stars winked out, as if devoured by some slouching celestial beast. They stood together as the Chione hurtled into the teeth of the gale and Nazafareen’s heart stirred with a strange exhilaration. She’d always thought earth to be the strongest element, but the spectacle of air and water clashing together in all their fury quickly disabused her of that notion. Never had she felt so small and helpless. But the bravery of the Marakai crew, who clung to the rigging like a flock of dark birds and laughed in the face of the storm, gave her courage.
Due north they ran. The seas grew heavier. Lightning forked overhead.
“Get below,” Captain Mafuone ordered. She stood on the quarterdeck, arms crossed and legs spread. “It will be upon us in minutes.”
Neither Nazafareen nor Darius put up an argument. They retreated to her cabin and huddled on the bunk as the storm broke with shocking suddenness. Rain hissed against the porthole, and the darkness was absolute except for flashes of blue-white lightning. Deafening booms of thunder shook the timbers of the ship. As the hours passed, the waves grew so mountainous they overtopped the deck and burst through into the companionways of the vessel. Freezing water crept beneath the door. Nazafareen gripped the rails around the bunk as the ship pitched and rolled, sending her belongings tumbling about the cabin. The roar of the tempest drowned out any attempts at speech so she and Darius simply held each other, waiting to see what would happen next.
As the storm reached its zenith, a terrible crack rang out. She thought it could only be one of the masts breaking in half. This was followed by the clatter of hailstones the size of oranges pummeling the deck. Nazafareen didn’t think the Chione could survive another minute, but somehow the ship stayed afloat.
It was the darkness she hated the most. Since her encounter with the snake that long-ago night in the forest, Nazafareen dreaded the lacuna—the period when none of Noctune’s three moons were visible. The daēvas called it True Night. If the stars were obscured by clouds, the blackness felt crushing, dense and solid. But the lacuna usually lasted a few minutes. This darkness had persisted for hours. Each sloshing roll might be the last if the ship capsized, and Nazafareen knew she’d never make it out if that happened.
Finally, with the water steadily rising, she and Darius reached an unspoken agreement that they’d rather be drowned above than below, so they clawed their way through frigid knee-deep water up the ladder to the deck. As Nazafareen poked her head out of the shattered hatch, the ship climbed a great, curling wave and scudded down the back side with a sickening lurch. Wind whistled in her ears. It whipped froth from the surface into the curtains of rain so one could hardly tell where the sea ended and the skies began. She seized a bit of rope and held tight as a fork of lightning illuminated the scene of devastation.
Both masts had cracked, the top halves swept clean away. Bits of shredded sail flapped in the rigging. Water rushed everywhere, pouring into cracks where the hail had smashed through the deck. A knot of Marakai sailors huddled with Captain Mafuone, all of them soaked to the skin. Nazafareen hauled herself along the rope, reaching forward with her left hand and then using the crook of her right arm to keep from being flung overboard. She felt Darius’s fist gripping the back of her tunic.
“How much more of this?” Nazafareen yelled when she was close enough to be heard.
Captain Mafuone turned. “The storm is big,” she yelled back. “The outer edge is still a day away.”
Nazafareen blinked stinging saltwater from her eyes and shared a grim look with Darius. A day?
The captain muttered something to herself, then conferred with the daēva Nazafareen knew to be her current master. An order was quickly relayed to the crew, who began hauling up the cargo from the hold and tossing it over the side. Barrels and crates, chests and clay amphorae, all vanished into the heaving waters. Captain Mafuone held her arms to the sky and chanted something in a strange tongue.
“What are they doing?” Nazafareen shouted to Darius.
He shook his head, hair plastered against his pale face. “I’ve no idea!”
With the cargo gone, the ship had almost no ballast and the waves flung her about even more violently. It made no sense. Nazafareen feared the Marakai were carrying out some final ritual in preparation for the certain death that awaited them all. Then she felt Darius’s hand tighten on her arm. She followed his gaze toward the horizon. A patch of darkness lurked there even blacker than the sky. He drew her close and they clung together like children.
“What is that?” she whispered.
His eyes narrowed, the irises glowing an eerie blue. “I think it’s a wave,” he said faintly.
“The rope!” she cried.
He seized the end and wound it around them, tying it off in a quick knot.
The sea began to rise like an incoming tide, lifting the Chione higher and higher. Darius was wrong, she decided. This thing rushing toward them was not simply a wave. It had no slope at all—the face appeared vertical. The top, which towered at a hideous height above, did not curl, although a thin white line ran along the crest and streaks of froth poured down the face like a waterfall. In no time at all, the smasher was upon them and the Chione’s bow lifted to meet it.
We’re going to capsize, Nazafareen thought with the perfect clarity of the damned.
Up and up the ship tilted, until the sky became the new horizon. Nazafareen pressed her face to Darius’s chest, the rope biting painfully into her back. And then the Chione gave a sudden, violent lurch. The ropes slackened and pulled tight again as the vessel righted itself and pitched forward. Nazafareen’s eyes flew open. A grey tentacle extended from the wave, coiling around the hull and lifting the Chione clear as the smasher passed beneath her. More tentacles—thick as the boles of an ancient oak—encircled the quarter deck and forecastle. Nazafareen gasped as one slithered past her foot. It had a smooth gray hide with tiny pale suckers on the underside. She couldn’t begin to fathom the size of the creature they belonged to. She had just decided they’d traded one gruesome end for another when the crew gave a ragged cheer.
“She has accepted our offering,” Captain Mafuone shouted. “The price is paid. The bargain struck.”
Far below, the sea continued to rage and boil, but the monster held the Chione as gently as a babe in arms. She swam smoothly through the water, only her powerful tentacles visible against the waves. Nazafareen and Darius shared a look of awe.
“It must be Sat-bu!” Nazafareen whispered, thinking of the tattoos of the faceless monster worn by the crew.
“They might have called on her a bit earlier,” Darius replied with a shaky grin. “Though I suppose the captain didn’t wish to part with her cargo until she had no choice.”
The rain still beat down, but from her vantage point high above the waves, Nazafareen’s terror began to ebb and she peered at the sea, hoping for a glimpse of the creature’s face.
“I wondered if these sea gods they worship were real or made up, like the Greek ones,” she mused. “Do you think it’s just tentacles?”
“I don’t know. They must be attached to something…else.”
But whatever the rest of the creature looked like would remain a mystery. She carried them for many leagues to the edge of the storm, where she deposited them back into the sea and sank into the depths. Water streamed from the portholes as the Marakai used the power to drain the ship and effect hasty repairs to the hull. Darius’s skill with wood came in handy, and they both pitched in until it was certain the Chione would stay afloat. Then they crawled below and fell into a sodden, dreamless sleep.
When Nazafareen woke, the sky had cleared and the moons shone down, but the sea was still rough and driven by strong winds. Darius had already gone. He seemed to dislike the cramped confines of the cabin and rarely stayed below more than a few hours. She found him with the Maenads and Herodotus on deck, the latter looking bruised and tired but glad to be alive.
“If there’s a gate to the underworld in the Isles, just push me through when we get there,” Megaera declared as Nazafareen approached. “I’d rather brave the harpies than set foot on a ship again.”
“At least my sickness is passed,” Rhea put in. The tallest of the group, she stood regally at the bow, her pinecone-tipped staff in hand. “I think the storm beat it right out of me.”
Nazafareen eyed Herodotus, whose pockets bristled with rolled up parchment like the quills of a porcupine. “I clung to a ladder all night,” he confessed. “But I kept them dry. A record of all our adventures so far. I plan to write a book, you see, perhaps more than one—”
“Did you see it?” Charis interrupted, her eyes shining with wonder. “The beast?”
“Not it,” Captain Mafuone corrected tartly, striding over. “Her. And She hears all, so you’d best guard your tongue.”
Charis snapped her mouth shut and made the sign of forked fingers to ward off ill luck.
“No disrespect meant, Captain,” she muttered.
“None taken,” Mafuone said grudgingly.
Nazafareen joined Darius, wrapping her arm around his waist. He scanned the sea. “Where are we?”
“Not far from the Isles,” Captain Mafuone replied. “But thanks to the gracious intervention of Sat-bu, there’s no need to go there.” She shared a look with Kallisto, who nodded, excitement in her eyes.
In the distance, Nazafareen saw a thick grey line, though to her relief it didn’t appear to be moving.
“That is the place we seek,” Kallisto said, following her gaze. “The home of Sakhet-ra-katme.”
“What’s in there?” Nazafareen asked. “An island?”
Kallisto smiled. “You’ll see shortly. It’s lucky Sat-bu brought us here.”
“More than luck, I think,” Captain Mafuone said. “They say one must have great need to find Sakhet. Perhaps the goddess knew this and helped us.”
“Then we owe her a debt,” Rhea said solemnly.
Mafuone smiled. “She likes pretty things, or objects of sentimental value. If you wish, you may offer something to the waves. But Sat-bu’s price has been paid. The treaty honored.”
She turned away and signaled to the crew. A squall brought fresh curtains of rain and they all drew up their hoods. Scraps of sail rattled like pennants from a bloody battle.
“I’ve never lost a ship yet,” the captain muttered. “But if we don’t reach port soon, we may all be swimming with Sat-bu.”
And so the Chione lurched forward, drawn on swift currents toward the line of grey mist.