Page 51 of The Isles of the Gods
JUDE
TheMacean’s Fist
The Crescent Sea
I got to know one of the sailors on the way home.
The sun went down, and the stars came out one by one, the first few pinpricks of light appearing in the velvet blue sky as I watched, wishing the roiling in my gut would settle. Those first few stars were joined by more, and then more, until they were a stunning sweep across the heavens, more vivid here than anywhere I’ve ever seen. But my head was aching, and I’d thrown up everything I’d ever eaten by then, and the beauty was lost on me.
I was leaning against the rail, unable to bear the thought of shoving myself into the confines of my little bunk belowdecks—far too much like a coffin—and he came up to join me near the bow, looming out of the darkness.
His face was as white as the foam streaming beneath the ship, copper hair dulled in the dark. “Can’t sleep?” he asked with a sympathetic grimace.
I shook my head.
“I’m Varon,” he said, offering me his hand to shake. “Good to meet you.”
“Jude,” I managed. It made it worse that he was friendly and smiling. That he looked like the kind of guy I’d usually go out of my way to talk to. To flirt with.
Thatmade me think of Tom, the boy I…well, I don’t know what we are. He’s a bartender at Ruby Red, one of Ruby’s underground clubs, and though I suppose technically he works for a gang boss, the reality is he just likes mixing drinks, and he’s good at it, and the club is where he happened to get a job.
Perhaps Varon is just really good at killing people.
It’s so much harder, finding that they’re normal people, the ones who did this, and I’d pass them in the street without imagining for a moment they were murderers.
“Iheardyou had an accent,” he said, as if confirming it was some kind of personal triumph. “She was calling you ‘His Lordship’ before—you something fancy?”
I shook my head. “Couldn’t be less fancy,” I replied. “The accent’s from Kirkpool, where I grew up. I’m from Port Naranda these days.”
“What’s Kirkpool like?” he asked, leaning against the rail and making himself comfortable. “Never made it that far, and I guess I won’t be going there anytime soon, will I?”
I had just been beginning to relax, his smile unwinding something in me. But those flippant words pulled me back to earth with a thud, and I didn’t reply.
He just absorbed my silence, giving up the view of the dark water below us and the bright stars above to study me instead.
When he spoke again, his tone was gentle. “You can’t blame yourself, Jude. It would have happened with or without you.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I replied, not knowing the words were coming until I spoke them. “It happened with me.”
Because that’s the truth of it.
I’m a part of this now. I participated in a slaughter, even if all I did was watch.
A part of me didn’t believe she’d go through with it, but with the green sister at one shoulder and Ruby at the other, I think Laskia’s as hemmed in as I am. The only difference is she put herself there.
Another piece of me wants to ask if there’s something I could have done to stop it, and the rest of me knows I can’t afford to wonder. They have my mother.
I’m positive that as we sailed away from that merchant ship, I saw a figure slide across the deck. I didn’t say anything—I didn’t want someone to kill them then and there—but now I keep wondering how long it took them to drown, or if they’re still clinging to the wreckage, waiting to die. And if that’s worse.
I keep thinking about Wollesley as well. It was like some kind of nightmare—as if wiping out a fleet carrying Leander and half our friends from school wasn’t enough, then the witnesses we tracked down had another of our classmates?
The two of us never particularly got along at school—he had all the breeding to fit in but was still an outcast. I had none of it, but I made myself useful and managed to make friends. Leander never seemed to care I was lowborn, and since he didn’t, nobody else did either. I can still see him, grinning likehe knew a secret, holding out his hand and calling for me to join in his latest piece of madness.
That’s another thing I’m not sure of—would it have been worse to see him die, or is it worse not to know how he died, which cannonball or grenade or falling mast ended him? Did he die before the friends we both had on that fleet, or after?
None of it matters now, though. My friends were never really my friends, and he’s as dead as all the rest of them. And I’m standing with a sailor I don’t know on the deck of this ship.
There’ll be a purse in this for me, and I’m going to use it to get Mum as far from the city as I can.
