Page 34 of Venom & Vanity

I turn back to the path.

“Then let's go,” I say.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PRINCE

The eastern lighthouse sits on the edge of the world.

That's the only way I've ever been able to describe it to myself on the nights I've stood on the far side of this island and looked across the dark at it. It doesn't look like something built to guide ships home. It looks like something that grew there, forced up through the cliff rock by the same slow pressure that made the cliffs themselves. Black stone and salt and the specific bleakness of a place that's never once been warm.

It sits at the edge of a drop that has no bottom you can see from any angle. The cliff falls away beneath it in a sheer dark face and the water at the base isn't the water of the rest of the island. It's something colder and more violent, the kind that moves with a purpose and doesn't care what it takes with it. On clear days you can see the spray from half way across the island, white mist rising from below like the cliff's breathing.

Tonight the sky's low and close, the lighthouse a dark shape against it. No light from the lamp. Just the silhouette of it against clouds that carry the particular purple-grey of a storm that hasn't decided yet whether it's coming or going. The rocks at its base aren't visible from here but I know they're there. I've looked at this lighthouse from a distance for two years and in that time I've never once seen the lamp burn.

It's always looked exactly like this. Like something that gave up.

We make it halfway before Doc raises his hand.

The path between here and the eastern cliff is rough ground. Uneven rock and root, the kind of terrain that takes an ankle if you push it in the dark. The distance isn't the problem. The ground is. It's late and the fire we left at the cabin is already a memory and the dark out here on the far side of the island is the particular complete dark of a place with no lamp to break it.

“We camp here,” Doc says.

Nobody argues.

Cinder's three are practical enough to accept it without question. I've been watching them across the distance of this walk and they move well, her men. Loose and coordinated in the way of people who've learned each other's rhythms. Jaq and Gus with the specific mirror quality of brothers who've been beside each other long enough that their instincts have merged. Duke quieter, the fulcrum of the three of them, holding the balance the way I do for ours.

The girls are tired. Neither of them has said so. But I can see it in the set of Snow's shoulders and the particular quality of the silence she's been carrying for the last hour of walking. She's been somewhere else. Physically present, one foot in front of the other, red mask catching what little light the clouded sky offers, but whatever's running behind her eyes hasn't been on this path.

We make camp without ceremony. Between the six of us a fire's built and bedrolls laid and Cinder and two of her men settle into their side of it with the ease of people who've been living rough long enough to make any ground feel like home. Jaq is taking first watch, we’ll all take turns throughout the night, this island is home to a lot of dangerous people.

Snow sits at the edge of the firelight with her knees drawn up, her eyes on the black shape of the lighthouse in the distance. The red of her mask catches the fire's glow and throws it back in a dull gleam.

I watch her for a while.

Doc catches my eyes across the fire, his own mask turned toward me, dark and still.

Bash's already looking at her.

The three of us have been doing this since she arrived. This wordless triangulation, tracking her the way you track something you're not yet sure how to approach. She's not fragile, she'd hate the implication, but there's something about the silence she's been carrying tonight that's different to the silences we've learned to read from her. The focused ones, the strategic ones, the ones that mean she's building something.

This one's none of those.

This one's got the quality of something held very carefully for a very long time and getting heavier.

Doc stands and crosses to her without preamble, which is his way, and settles on the ground beside her. Bash moves a moment later and takes the other side. I give it another beat and then I go because there's nowhere else any of us are going to be.

The four of us sit at the edge of the firelight with the dark island pressing in on three sides and the lighthouse a smudge against the low sky ahead. Below the cliff, too far to hear but present in the way things are when you know they're there, the violent water moves against the rocks in the dark.

Nobody speaks.

Then Doc says, without looking at her, in the tone he uses when the question's not a suggestion, “Talk.”

Snow keeps her eyes on the lighthouse. “I'm fine.”

“You've been quiet since we left the cabin.” Bash's voice is low, not carrying to the other side of the fire. “That's not fine. That's you carrying something you've decided not to put down.”

“I'm allowed to be quiet.”