Hond Steading had no idea the force it harbored. She hoped, deeply, that if its people knew then they might be grateful.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Detan found food in his room, a cold plate of hard cheese and crackers left sometime in the morning. The sustenance wasn’t much, but he’d eaten worse fare, and the solidness in his stomach was enough to spit some vigor back into his veins.
Best not to think about veins.
A niggling itch had anchored itself in the crook of his elbow. Nothing based in reality, he knew it was little more than his mind reminding him of what it was missing. Still, hard to ignore a figment of your imagination when it was working up real, physical distress. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and froze.
Cursed skies, he was a mess. Passable for any working man of Aransa, sure, but that was hardly the point. His hair, still wet from the wash-water, slumped across his forehead, and though his clothes were fine he’d put no care into wearing them. They hung untucked and loose, rumpled and just as ragged as his face. He looked the part of a drunkard and a wastrel, not a lord of high station. Certainly no fiance to Thratia Ganal.
And his image mattered now, make no mistake. He’d hardly enter into any con game playing a nobleman in a state like this. Why was the simple fact he was playing at being himself any different? Tibs would have slapped him upside the head, to see him now. This was not how the game was played. Loose and by ear, surely, but not sloppy. Never that.
With renewed vigor he straightened his clothes and made close acquaintance with a comb. Now he was ready. People were keen to let a man in a crisp suit go wherever he wanted.
Down on the dock, where so very much of his recent life had turned for the worse, he paused for a quick reconnaissance. Aella’s ship, the Crested Fool, drifted lazily from its rope ties. The ship was a solid transport vessel, but Thratia’s dock had been built for a grander ship, for the Larkspur he had once stolen from her and handed into Pelkaia’s care. The Crested Fool looked like a child’s toy in comparison. It just so happened that this particular toy belonged to one demented child.
No guards made their presence known on the dock. In fact, the place was practically deserted. Detan huffed and tugged his freshly ironed lapels. All that work to prepare himself, and he didn’t even have a keen-eyed servant to charm his way past. Such a waste of his brilliance.
As he jogged up the gangplank, it occurred to him that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make it look as if this ship was of no consequence.
“Ahoy!” he called, pausing while his voice echoed throughout the apparently empty ship. No response. Not even a board creaked under his boot to welcome him. He eyed the ship from keel to bowsprit, recalling what little he’d had access to during the long transit from the Remnant to Aransa.
Aella had kept him cooped up in his cabin at the aft end of the ship, allowing him time to roam the deck but otherwise corralling him to his room and her laboratory. Both rooms were in the ship’s aft. And though Aella’d never struck him as a particularly reasonable girl, it did make sense that she’d cloister those things which she did not want him stumbling across toward the fore.
He shoved his hands in his pocket and affected a merry saunter so that anyone who happened across him would think him out for a stroll, not a snoop. The Crested Fool stretched long and flat, looking more like the worn leather of an old shoe than an airship. Its buoyancy sacks were practical things, a careful network of sewn and waxed leather held snug under a knotted net of flax rope. All of the cabins were clustered in the center of the ship, a smaller mirror of the vessel’s overall shape. Some stroke of genius had inspired the maker to be certain the buoyancy sacks kept the cabins in their shade for most of the day, shielding weary travelers from the harsh desert sun.
A cute little ship, purpose built for hauling people, but not a ship he’d ever want to steal. Pity, that. He was itching for a good heist.
Casting a glance around to make sure he was still alone, Detan strolled along the cabin building, testing doors until he found one unlocked. The hall was dark, the lanterns shuttered tight, but not yet coated in dust. Detan frowned at the nearest lantern, grabbing it from its loop. They hadn’t been in Aransa long, but dust was quick to settle in this city, and someone had gone to a whole lot of trouble to make it look like this ship was being neglected. Certainly the servants weren’t popping on board to give it the occasional dusting. Someone used this lantern – recently, and regularly. But whoever that was, they hadn’t been kind enough to leave behind a flint.
He glared at the cold wick and gave the lantern a shake, just to hear the oil slosh in its base. He didn’t dare go back to his room, or leave the ship to trouble a servant for a flint. No one knew he was here, and every chance he took had to offer a really fucking great payoff to be worth it.
But with the door shut behind him, as it must be to hide his presence, the hall was pitch black. He glared at the hall, glared at the lamp. Neither obliged him with a solution.
He wasn’t carrying a flint, but the selium Aella had given him to practice with was still tucked into his pocket, returned there on a whim after he’d washed and changed. Aella’d worked him until his senses were numb, but still… He had been practicing, and improving, hadn’t he? And what good was all this work, all this pain and sacrifice, if he could not use the things he’d learned to further his own goals?
He was not stressed. Not angry. No one was about to watch him struggle at his work. The shadows certainly wouldn’t judge him. Before he’d consciously made his decision, he breathed out, long and slow, forcing some of the tension out of his muscles.
The selium bladder was no bigger than the palm of his hand. The kind of thing rich families used to send strips of painted paper into the sky at celebrations. He extended his senses even as he whisked off the cap, holding the selium in the bladder against its will to rise. He sectioned off the tiniest fragment he could imagine and still control, a sliver no larger than his pinky nail, and floated it free before clamping the cap back on.
Easy, now. With deliberate movements he slipped the bladder back into his pocket and let awareness of it fade from his mind. For just a breath his senses threatened to extend to the mass of selium hidden in the ship’s buoyancy sacks above, but his long practice with Aella allowed him to shunt the greater mass away and focus on the smaller sliver.
It came so simply to him he almost shouted with triumph, but the surge of pride threatened to overwhelm his control. Easy, he reminded himself. Smooth and focused.
Measuring his breathing, he steadied himself. He’d trained for this so many times, been taunted by Aella every time he failed. Now, on his own, when he truly needed his power, it would not fail him. He would not allow it. Fingers calm as stone, he flicked open a pane of glass on the lantern and crouched to set it on the floor just in front of him. He stayed in that crouch, sweat seeping through the back of his shirt, but ignored the dual exertion of mind and body.
His senses screamed for finer control still. Never before had he been so keenly aware that his senses were deadened to the reality around him, never before had he felt the ache of that loss. Callia’s injection, and later Aella’s, had opened up a world to him that he had never even imagined might be real. Coss’s world. A world suffused with selium on every level, so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.