Chapter 47
The Boy from the Legends
For days, Archer slept.
He dreamed, of course. The dreams were a part of him now. He was a boy who’d had terrible things done to him and who’d done terrible things himself. He was a boy who nightmared.
He was also a boy who awoke, and when he opened his eyes, Sefia was there, mending sails with Doc or playing Ship of Fools with Horse and Marmalade, her very presence all the reassurance he needed.
Only once, early on, did he awake alone. He’d been dreaming about Frey and Aljan—the angle of Frey’s arm beneath her unmoving body, the way the blood ran into Aljan’s eyes—and found himself alone in the sick bay. The setting sun flamed in the portholes, and Doc’s dried herbs swayed overhead like hanged men.
Down the corridor, he could hear the crew talking, the faint, halting notes of a mandolin.
Though Archer wasn’t supposed to move about by himself, he staggered from the cabin, up the hatchway. He could feel the stitches in his side pulling, blood seeping into his bandages. But he had to find Sefia. To be sure she was still here.
She was standing at the rail, silhouetted by the light reflecting off the water, brilliant and gold. She looked beautiful . . . and pensive. Maybe even guilty.
But he felt that guilt too, for all the mistakes he’d made, for not going after her when she left, for Frey and Aljan falling into the Guard’s hands. Maybe he always would.
After a moment, Meeks joined her. Their murmured conversation was too quiet for him to hear, except for the sound of the second mate asking if it was written. As darkness slid over the sky, they lapsed into silence, and Archer slipped belowdecks again, clutching his injured side.
When he awoke next, the bandages had been changed, and Sefia was curled beside him in the narrow bunk. He did not ask her to move.
It was during these times, when they were alone, that he began to tell her, hesitantly, in fits and starts, about the past he’d kept from her: the acts of viciousness he’d witnessed, the ones he’d committed, the family he could not return to, no matter how much he loved them. He showed her his guilt, his anger, his self-loathing, his insatiable desire for violence. He began to peel himself open for her, layer by painful layer, revealing his raw and wounded heart.
He didn’t tell her everything. How could he? There was so much to tell, and there was so much that was still broken inside him. But it was a start.
In turn, she told him about her deal with Tanin, her return to the house on the hill overlooking the sea, her father’s letter.
“You left to save me,” Archer murmured, touching the worry stone where it rested between her collarbones.
She swallowed. “I came back to save you.”
His fingers trailed up the side of her neck to the back of her head, where they twined in her hair. Pain streaked along his side, but he chose to ignore it, bringing his mouth so close to hers he could feel her breath on his lips. “You always save me,” he whispered.
He kissed her.
And in that second, kissing her was everything. An explosion—a downpour—a secret. A sigh—a bolt of lightning—the feeling of flight before the fall.
His hand slid beneath the hem of her shirt, fingertips grazing her ribs.
Sefia gasped, and it was such a sweet sound it made Archer’s head spin and his bones ache with desire.
“I love you,” she whispered as his lips found her jaw, the lobe of her ear, her throat.
He didn’t know how badly he’d been wanting to hear the words until she said them, but there they were, turning slowly in the air like crystals in sunlight, and they were the best words and the only words and he would pin them to his heart until his dying day.
He was a boy who was loved.
• • •
One time when he awoke, Captain Reed was sitting in the sick bay, peering through the portholes at the swells outside. He had a new gun, Archer noted—a long-nosed revolver with a jet-black grip—and somehow, in the light through the glass, the captain’s eyes looked bluer, hungrier.
He looked how Archer felt when he was fighting.
But that life was behind him. It had to be—he knew that now—if he wanted to live.
As Archer sat up, a smile softened the harshness in Reed’s eyes. “Hey, kid.” He pulled up a stool beside the bunk. “Sef’s been tellin’ us what you were up to in Deliene. What’d I tell you? You don’t got a ship, but you sure as shootin’ are an outlaw.”
Archer smiled. “Thanks, Cap.”
“So you do talk.” Reed chuckled. “Hard to believe ’til I heard it myself.”
“It took me a while.”
“That’s okay.” Captain Reed’s eyes got that starving look to them again. “Some things are worth the wait.”
Archer cocked his head, his hand going to his temple, but before he could ask what Reed meant, Sefia burst into the cabin with a heaping platter of sweets. Her face brightened when she saw him, with a spark he wished he could bottle for dark nights.
Placing the plate on his shins, she grabbed an egg custard and sat on the end of the bunk. “So there was writing on the inside of the bell, huh?” she asked Reed.
He passed her a folded sheet of parchment and scratched his chest. “I’d know those marks anywhere.”
She watched him sadly for a moment. “I’m sorry they did that to you.”
It had taken them a while to see all the ways their lives were connected, but once Reed had told her about the Resurrection Amulet inside the Trove of the King, and Sefia had told him about the missing page her mother had removed from the Book, they’d realized Lon and Mareah had given him his first tattoos. They’d hidden the location of something Tanin wanted: the last piece of the Resurrection Amulet, a magical object that could conquer death, an object Reed now wanted too.
“It don’t matter now.” The captain shrugged, though Archer could see his anger—and his disappointment. “Those words are long gone. We ain’t gonna find the last bit of the Amulet that way.”
“The Book can tell us where to find it.”
Archer frowned. “I thought we couldn’t trust the Book.”
“We can’t,” Sefia said as she unfolded the paper Reed had given her. “But we need it to rescue Frey and Aljan. And find the Amulet inside the Trove.”
It was all too connected, too convenient, too coincidental.
And as Tanin had said, There are no coincidences.
“What if that’s what it wants us to do?” Archer asked.
Reed shook his head. “You talk about this thing like it’s alive.”
“Erastis did say the Book was a living story, full of intent,” Sefia replied, skimming the charcoal rubbing in her hands.
The captain traced a set of interconnected circles on the worn edge of the bunk. “Maybe it’s a livin’ story because we’re still livin’ it, and our actions ain’t foregone conclusions after all.”
She smiled grimly. “Let’s hope so.” After a moment, she began to read:
The brave and the bold may find Liccarine gold
Where the stallions charge into the spray.
Where the sidewinder waits, the heart lowers its gates,
And the water will show you the way.
Archer watched Reed carefully as the captain listened to the words he’d been waiting months to hear. There it was again—hunger and hope.
“Do you know what it means?” Archer asked.
Captain Reed grinned. “I know where to start.” A place on the outer curve of Liccaro where the cliffs formed the shapes of mustangs: teeth and heads and hooves. “It’s called Steeds. Don’t know about the rest yet, but we’ll figure it out when we get there.”
• • •
What are we going to do?” Sefia asked later, when they were alone again. “We go to Jahara to get the Book back. We rescue Frey and Aljan. We help Reed find the Amulet. And then? What do we do after?”
Archer scratched at one of his bandages. Some things they couldn’t do without the Book, like find Frey and Aljan, wherever they were. They were his bloodletters. He would not leave them to Serakeen.
But after? After they’d wrapped up their obligations to the bloodletters and to Captain Reed?
He couldn’t lead the bloodletters anymore, that was for sure, couldn’t go near a battle without kindling his thirst for bloodshed. Even now, he could feel the urge to fight stirring in his half-healed limbs.
But he didn’t want to be that boy. He couldn’t be that boy without letting Sefia down again.
He bit his lip. “It’s me, isn’t it?”
The boy with the scar.
The boy from the legends.
The boy the Guard wanted.
“Yes,” she whispered. “And it’s me too.”
“The reader.” He looped a strand of hair behind her ear.
She made a face.
“It suits you.”
“I’d rather be an outlaw, thanks.”
Archer kissed the top of her head. “Okay. Let’s be outlaws.”
He tried to imagine it: They’d stay on the Current, becoming adventurers and treasure hunters who harbored at Haven while the kingdoms battled for land, and they’d give no more thought to the Red War than some half-remembered dream. What a life they’d have. A life of salt and gunpowder. Of friendship and love and boundless horizons. A dangerous life, but a life.
But he could not entirely ignore the storm brewing inside him—dark and brimming with violence—the unquenchable desire to fight, to lead, to conquer.
With a shiver, Sefia tucked herself into the crook of his arm, and he held her, hoping she couldn’t feel the thunder in his chest.
They could beat the Book.
They could.
They had to.
For a moment, they watched the stars glimmering in the portholes as the constellations swam across the lampblack sky.
“What about the Guard?” he asked. “Won’t they still be hunting us?”
Sefia shrugged. “If we can change destiny, we can outwit the Guard.”
“You really think we can beat the Book?”
She looked up at him then, with that dark gaze he knew so well—focused, determined, daring. “Together, we can do anything.”