Ripka covered her embarrassment by taking a quick sip of her drink. Honey liqueur. Laced with selium bubbles. She nearly choked.
“Are you all right?” Mata came around the table in a second and patted her firmly on the back. Ripka waved her away, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Fine, fine, just… Where did you get this?”
Falston narrowed his eyes at her. “The open market this morning. Some Mercer from the west makes it.”
“Renold Grandon,” she said, rolling the cup around in her hand.
“Grandon, that’s the name. You know him?”
“He’s Aransan. Long-time ally of Thratia. This been coming into the city for a while?”
“A day or so,” Mata said.
Falston and Ripka exchanged a long, heavy look.
“No business at the dinner table,” Falston said.
She nodded, understanding. When Ripka had arrived in Hond Steading, Grandon’s liqueur had been nowhere to be found, and so she’d focused on the bright eye berry cafes. If Thratia had now begun slipping weapons into the city, it was probably too late to stop them. She’d tried. And she’d missed.
“Can I get you something else?” Mata asked.
“No,” she smiled as she took another swallow without choking. “This is wonderful, thank you. The little bit of home surprised me, that’s all.”
Mata gave her a look that said clear as day she didn’t believe her for a second, but wasn’t about to argue with a guest in her own kitchen.
Kalliah clambered atop a chair and propped her fists on her hips, head high. “I’m gonna be a lady captain too!”
The adults laughed while the girl looked put upon, and the evening fell into small talk and praise of the food. Ripka grew warmer with every bite and sip. By the time they were finished, Ripka felt heavier than she’d ever felt in her life.
She made her goodbyes and dragged herself to the door, sluggish with sleep and food, Kalliah dogging every step she took with made-up stories of the little girl’s exploits as a captain.
Mata ushered the girl off to bed, then rejoined Falston and Ripka on the front step, and pretended rather smoothly not to notice that their topic of conversation had switched from watcher business to the clearness of the night the moment she appeared.
“Pleasure to have had you,” Falston said and clapped her hard on the shoulder.
Mata swooped in, gripped her hand and pulled her into a half-hug, leaning close to whisper lightning quick so that her husband wouldn’t notice, “Look after him.”
She was away in an instant, but the words clung to Ripka like cactus thorns.
“Thank you for your hospitality.” She managed a smile, hoped it looked genuine, then made her escape before Falston could pick up on the shift in her mood. She didn’t want to explain to him that his wife was worried for his safety. Even less, did she want to explain to Mata that what they were doing now was very, very dangerous?
And she’d begun it. She’d reached out to Lakon for help and stood in that forum, swaying the people of Hond Steading to hand over their wellbeing to protect a city that might not be savable. In a week’s time, they could all be dust. And that’d sit on Ripka’s shoulders, if she hadn’t gone and joined them.
A steady monsoon of rain began to fall, warm and thick. She was soaked through before she reached Latia’s house, and all she wanted was a dry change of clothes and a warm bed. When she opened the door, however, what she found was a full house waiting up for her in the living room. Every head swiveled towards her as she stepped inside.
“What’s happened?” she said, reaching instinctively for her weapons belt.
“Nice to see you too, Cap’in,” an all too-familiar voice drawled.
Ripka pushed rain-drenched hair from her eyes and squinted through the low light. Forge and Clink sat alongside Honey on the couch, their grins a mirror of one another’s.
“Holy shit,” Ripka said. “What…?”
“Got a package for you. From that Honding idiot.”
Clink pulled a bundle from her severe, black uniform – a Honding servant’s uniform – and handed it out. Ripka crossed the room shakily, not quite believing what she saw, and undid the string. A handful of heavy, fine parchment with the letterhead of house Honding fell out. Along with a thick, brass signet ring. Detan’s. Had to be.
Forge whistled low. “Guess he’s got ears after all.”
“We’re going to a wedding,” Tibal drawled, and Ripka didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
Chapter Forty-Eight
The flier’s wheel beneath his hands, the cool air pushing back his hair. These things combined to ease in him a tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying. Despite returning to his familial home, this was where he belonged. The sky was his real home, the selium in the buoyancy sacks above his head an extension of himself. Nowhere else had ever made him feel so whole.
The only trouble was, he had an unfortunate habit of setting the whole thing on fire now and then. Had been his habit, he reminded himself. His control was growing by bounds every day. Even without active training, he knew he had begun to outpace Aella’s expectations. He could see it in the hunger in her eyes. Girl might be cold as a fish most of the day, but any progress on her research lit her up like a firemount.
Best not to think of firemounts, just now.
He steered away from the palace, put his back to the vista of the city that was both his duty and his burden.
He hadn’t known what he was going to do when he took the flier. Had only been acting on an intense desire to get away from Thratia, from the palace, from the hulk of responsibilities and terrors that rested on his shoulders, penning him in. But now that he had the wind in his hair and the wheel beneath his hands, he was able to think clearly in a way that’d eluded him ever since he’d found himself bending knee to Aella on the Remnant.
If Thratia thought she’d bag him as a husband, roll up his city in some neat little farce of a contract, and kick him to the whitecoats to deal with, she was fucking delusional.
He yanked on the wheel, listened to the wind scream as he brought the flier hard around and pointed it straight toward the northern coast. He wasn’t running. Not this time. Not ever again. But he couldn’t do what he set out to do alone. There was only one person left in Hond Steading who could help him pull this off without major bloodshed.
It was just too bad for him that she hated him with a burning passion.
Detan brought the flier, smooth as oil, alongside the sleek figure of the Larkspur. The ship’d been docked on the north edge of the city, far away from the population center, but that hadn’t hidden it from his view when he’d flown in on the Dread Wind. A ship like the Larkspur was hard to miss – it drew the eye, the heart. Thratia had good taste in ships, that was for sure. Too bad she had terrible ideas about everything else.
“Ho, Larkspur!” he called, and waited. And waited. No one seemed to be aboard, or no one who wanted to talk to him, anyway. He guided the flier to the opposite side of the dock, dropped a handful of grains in the porter’s lockbox and tied off.
The Larkspur’s gangplank tongued the dock, and as he strode up it he wondered who in the pits had been dumb enough to leave it down with a non-responsive crew on board. Ships like the Larkspur drew a lot of eyes, and sticky fingers, too.
He mounted the deck, ready to ream some lackey of Pelkaia’s for poor ship management, and stopped cold. Pelkaia herself sat in the center of the deck on a lounge chair tucked up under the shadow of the mainmast. Her head was tipped back, eyes stuck on the empty sky, a plethora of bottles scattered across the deck around her. Pools of shadow gathered in her sunken cheeks and, for just a heartbeat, he thought she was dead. Her head lifted. She squinted at him a moment, slow to recognition, and snort-laughed.