Deathmarked (The Fatemarked Epic Book 4) Page 31

  The same pirate king who bore a marking like his sister’s, the opposite half of her golden key. A key that could kill all the fatemarked, including Bane, at the expense of their own lives. But that wasn’t the only use. No, if they used their power in the proximity of others who were marked, it would strengthen them.

  Which was why they were bound for Phanes, where the Terans had long been enslaved and oppressed. King Erric, though a pirate by trade, had targeted the Phanecian ships for many years, taking from the wealthy and giving to those in need, like the few poor Terans who remained in the motherland. He wasn’t what Grey had expected of a pirate; then again, Erric Clawborn was the first pirate he’d ever had the pleasure of meeting.

  And now I’m one too.

  Nearby, Captain Smithers spun the wheel, fighting against a mighty wave that threatened to capsize them. He roared with laughter, as though almost drowning would make for a splendid day.

  Grey shook his head. He hadn’t known the rugged man long enough to truly understand him, but despite everything that’d happened between them—the good, the bad, and the downright horrifying—he respected him.

  The ship—which Smithers had immediately renamed The Jewel II—was a gift from Erric, manned by those of Smither’s men who had survived Pirate’s Peril along with several other experienced pirates. She was a beauty, half again as big as The Jewel had been, with sleek curving lines and white canvas sails that made it the fastest ship in the fleet.

  The fleet, Grey thought, staring out as the other dozen or so ships scattered across the flanks of the riotous ocean. The largest was The Pirate Queen, Erric’s own ship, a monstrous vessel painted black with black sails strung from giant twin masts. The ship was so large it barely seemed to notice the roiling waves as they smashed into its hull. A long scrape ran down one side. We all bear scars, Grey thought. Even the ships.

  Shae had chosen to make the voyage on Erric’s ship. For the first time in Grey’s life, he’d let her make her own decision, though it still stung. Then again, his sister wasn’t a little girl anymore. No, the events that had almost killed her had matured her too. Strengthened her. She was strong, perhaps stronger than him.

  The sun was dipping precariously toward the horizon. “We’ll make anchor soon,” a voice said from behind.

  Grey smiled and turned, automatically opening his arms to receive Kyla as she fell into them. The captain’s daughter felt warm against him. She was lightning to his thunder, fire to his ice, and had shown her mettle on countless occasions since he’d met her, not the least of which was when she’d buried her lost babe at sea.

  And yet something felt off at times, like they’d been thrust together by forces they might never understand. Don’t fight a good thing, Grey thought, pulling her tighter against his chest. To do so is foolishness, something Grease Jolly would do.

  He could’ve held her all night, no words necessary, but the captain’s cry of “Make anchor!” eventually forced them apart. Their hands danced together as they crossed the deck and threw themselves into their work, other seamen scurrying around them, dropping the anchor into the water, tying off the sails, dragging out benches and preparing the evening meal. Mead flowed, warming hearts and bellies. Songs were sung, some bawdy, others filled with emotions as countless as the stars that now spotted the darkening night sky.

  Grey said little, laughed often, and soaked it all in.

  “What’s wrong?” Kyla finally asked. Her rich, brown eyes reflected starlight, her soft brown skin radiant under the glow of the torchlight. She’d been quiet too, seemingly content to be near him, to share this night that was as familiar as many of the others.

  And, of course, she could read him like a book. How does she do that? “I’m just tired,” he said.

  “Liar. Don’t make me hurt you.”

  A few weeks ago, he would’ve thought such a statement naught but a jape, but now…now he held his hands up defensively. “I wasn’t lying, I swear it. But I have been thinking about Shae a lot.” And you.

  “She’s safe with Erric.”

  “I know. What I mean is that I don’t know what will happen when we reach Phanes. I don’t know if I’ll be able to protect her the way I used to. She’s become…a stranger to me in a lot of ways.”

  Kyla pressed closer, and Grey couldn’t help but to relish the comfort she always brought him, nor the fact that he knew the feeling was mutual. “This isn’t all on you. Must I remind you?”

  Damn. I’m doing it again. That thing he always did when things began to spiral out of control. He loved to take the entire world and all its problems and set them on his shoulders until his back bent and his legs buckled. “You’re right. Sorry. Old habits and all that.”

  “It’s fine. That’s what I’m here for.” She tilted his chin toward her, her fingers running along the stubble of his jawline. Her lips found his and she kissed him deeply.

  “Get a room,” someone shouted, causing laughter to ripple across the merry band of pirates.

  “No,” Captain Smithers said. His cheeks were flushed from too much drink as he pointed his walking stick in Grey’s direction. “Don’t you dare, son. This is my ship and that is my daughter.”

  Grey smiled. “Don’t you worry, old man. I was just leaving.”

  “Do you want some company?” Kyla asked as Grey swung a leg over to board the rowboat.

  Grey felt bad saying no, but he needed to talk to his sister and Erric alone. “Maybe next time,” he said. “Sleep well. See you in the morning.”

  Kyla nodded, but he could see she was disappointed. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek softly. “If you need to talk when you return, you can wake me.”

  Gods, this woman is too good for me by half, he thought. “Thank you.” He cupped her cheek briefly, and then clambered down the metal ladder to the small boat, which had already been lowered to the water.

  Kyla watched him the entire time he oared backwards, pushing hard up the face of the biggest waves to ensure he didn’t capsize. The Pirate Queen was anchored nearby, and when he reached it, the crew dropped ropes, which he threaded through the iron fittings on each end. He used his wrist to pin the rope against the side while tying it off and tightening it with a combination of his hand and teeth.

  With a jerk, they lifted him and the boat from the water.

  Shae was waiting for him on deck, King Erric Clawborn just behind her. “Hello, Grey,” she said.

  “Sister. King,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  “About what?” The question came from Erric, who stepped forward to stand by Shae’s side. Seeing them like that, like a matched pair, instantly made Grey uncomfortable. Not because he was suspicious of Erric’s intentions, but because it used to be him by his sister’s side.

  “What will happen when we reach Phanes. What exactly you saw when you…uh…” Bonded? Connected? Every potential word made him more uneasy than the last.

  “We saw a dozen possible futures,” Shae said.

  Grey frowned. “But how do you know which one will come to pass?”

  “We don’t.” This time it was Erric who responded. “The future depends on us. Not only, but the other fatemarked, too. And some who do not bear markings.”

  Like me? Grey wondered. For so much of this journey he’d felt as if he was fate’s plaything, swept along on currents out of his control. But that wasn’t true, was it? He’d made choices. Some good, some terrible. I control my own future. “What will we do when we reach Phanes? How will we know where to go?” He’d finally stopped pretending that Shae’s voice didn’t matter. Though she’d become somewhat of an enigma to him, he thought perhaps he was beginning to understand her more.

  Shae smiled. “Much has happened on this voyage,” she said. Once Grey would’ve thought the statement frustratingly cryptic, but now he understood. Though the voyage itself had been uneventful, this life, this world, was bigger than any of them.

  “You’ve seen something,” he said. “Together.”

>   Erric nodded. “The sands of fate are shifting once more. Coalescing. We are part of it, a cog in a much larger wheel we are only just beginning to understand.”

  “What wheel?”

  Shae shook her head. “We don’t know, only that it’s centered in Phanes. At least, for now. It is ever-shifting, ever-changing, depending on the decisions we make.”

  Grey’s head was throbbing. Visions and fates and wheels…these things weren’t reality. At least not in the world he was accustomed to. Then again, he had to admit he’d blocked out his own sister’s mark of power for a long time. As if pretending something wasn’t there caused it to disappear, he thought. A childish notion. He knew he needed to stop being a child and face the truth head on. His sister was born with a marking. He didn’t know how or why, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was what they did now.

  Before he could say anything, however, Shae’s brows furrowed and she said, “Do you feel that?”

  She wasn’t speaking to Grey, her small face inclined toward Erric. “Yes,” he said. “Take my hand.”

  Shae reached out and grasped the pirate’s hand, their fingers knitting together. Shards of light burst between their fingers as their separate halves of a key was joined. Their bodies began to shake, their eyes rolling back in their heads.

  Grey hated this, hated feeling helpless and inadequate and…an outsider looking in on a life he’d once been a part of. He had the urge to rip their hands apart, to shove Erric back, to take his sister away to a place where he could keep her safe from herself and pirates and sea vampires and wars and some fate that seemed utterly out of their control.

  The old Grey would’ve. He watched, his jaw set, his teeth clenched, his hands knotted into fists.

  And then it was over, his sister gasping but maintaining her feet, Erric tumbling backwards, his chest heaving.

  “Wrath is angry,” Shae said, her eyes wild at first, but then focusing, meeting Grey’s.

  “Wrath is always angry,” Grey muttered. “What did you see?”

  “She’s lost control of it,” Shae said. “If she ever had control to begin with.”

  “Who has lost control? And of what?”

  “Rhea,” Shae said, and Grey’s head throbbed harder. “It comes. It comes for us.”

  Something bumped the bottom of the ship, hard enough to cause the deck to shift under Grey’s feet, nearly throwing him over the railing. He steadied himself with a hand. “What comes? What are you talking about?”

  “Wrathos,” Shae said.

  The night was shattered in two.

  Fifty

  The Southern Empire, Hemptown

  Rhea Loren

  Rhea awoke to darkness, her heart trying to pound its way out of her chest.

  She breathed rapidly, trying to determine what had awoken her. The night was quiet, relatively cool compared to the fiery heat of the day. A nightmare, she thought, trying to remember. The edges of the dream were fuzzy, the middle a complete blur. Something…

  She’d been stuck in Hemptown for a while now, fed and sheltered but otherwise bored in her confinement. A week or so ago—the days were beginning to blend together, making it difficult to keep track of the passage of time—she’d been given a spyglass and made to watch as the Phanecian riders attacked a group of rebels hiding amongst the Red Rocks. She’d seen several of them die from the strange fireroot powder weapons, their bodies carried away by the others. Most of them bore red skin and coppery hair, marking them as Terans. Slaves, she’d thought. Or at least they used to be, before the uprising.

  “Why did you make me watch this?” she’d asked Bane afterwards.

  His dark eyes had never left hers. “To show you how thin the space between life and death is,” he’d said.

  Rhea had wanted to growl back, “You think I don’t already know? I’ve lived in that space from the moment my father died!” but instead she’d clamped her mouth shut. Self-control, that was all she had left.

  The memory faded as she blinked away the darkness. The slivers of the bars came into view, and that familiar feeling wriggled inside her, like she was drowning, the walls closing in, pressing against her, squeezing, always squeezing.

  A memory was unleashed, the earliest she could remember:

  Her vision was blurry, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, dripping from her chin, soaking her blanket. The wooden bars surrounded her, and she could feel them getting closer, trying to trap her and all she wanted was to break them and run free, escape the crib in which she’d awoken in terror.

  She couldn’t breathe, her sobs coming in shaking gasps now, her hands clenching the bars and trying to break them, trying to escape, trying to—

  A scream unloosed itself from her throat and she couldn’t see, couldn’t get past the wall of darkness and—

  Then her mother was there, and her father, too, and they were holding her close and telling her it was going to be okay, making shushing sounds with their lips and she was no longer surrounded, no longer trapped.

  “No,” she sobbed, pointing at the crib with a shaking finger. Her next breath came in a shuddering sob. “No,” she said again. “No crib.”

  After that, they never made her sleep in that crib again.

  The memory faded and she found herself pressed up against the bars, her hands gripping them so tightly her fingers were aching. She didn’t recall having moved.

  Slowly, she released them, flexing her fingers. Took a deep breath, fighting back the tears, the fear. Remembered something her father had once said to her when she complained her room was too small, that the walls and ceiling were getting closer by the second: “You are a bird, Rhea. Nothing can trap you. Nothing can confine you. You are a free spirit.”

  She wished she had someone to talk to. Twice she’d requested to see Gaia, but she’d been refused. Twice she’d asked to see Bane, but again, her requests were denied.

  Why am I here, Wrath? What good am I to anyone locked in a cage? Worse, was her child meant to be born into confinement? A prince of nothing, she thought bitterly. Any determination she’d felt upon seeing Ennis was fading away. She’d been a fool to come here, a fool to think she held any power in this Wrathforsaken place.

  I am no bird. I am a slug, ready to be squashed.

  With a rush, the nightmare came back to her, the edges solidifying, the images crisp and clear. Slimy, barnacle-encrusted tentacles, writhing beneath the ocean’s surface. Hungry, so hungry. A beaked maw, one she’d seen as close as a hand held in front of her face. And that eye, as ancient and deep as the darkest reaches of the seafloor.

  Wrathos had followed her south.

  What have I done?

  Fifty-One

  The Southern Empire, the Burning Sea

  Grey Arris

  Where a moment earlier there had been nothing, now there were dozens of thick tentacles bursting through the deck, shredding timber and nail, punching holes in the floor.

  Grey was thrown to the side as one slammed against his hip. Mountains of seawater churned over the sides of the enormous ship, which Grey had never seen take on water before. A whitecapped wave hit him in the mouth and he choked, trying to get his breath.

  A monster! he tried to scream, but only a stream of water poured from his mouth.

  His next thought was Shae! but that was quickly erased when the same tentacle that had knocked him over probed across the slick deck, reaching for his foot.

  Pushing off with his knife and the heel of his hand, he scrabbled backwards and away, slamming into a barrel that had been toppled onto its side, rolling around the deck. Others spun and rolled around too, following the movement of the ship as it bucked and writhed in the monster’s grasp.

  Grey fought to his feet, dodging another flying barrel, his head on a swivel as he tried to locate Shae. Just as he found her clutching onto Erric, who was soaked to the skin and trying to pick his way toward the galley, there was an ear-wrenching cracking sound. Grey looked up to see the main mast swaying bac
k and forth, gripped by several tentacles. The massive sails were already torn and limp, barely hanging by a single unbroken rope.

  Another crack and the mast snapped like a twig under a boot. It seemed to hover in midair for a moment, and then accelerated for the deck like a felled tree, right for—

  “Shae!” Grey screamed, watching in horror as the path of the falling mast locked in on where his sister and the pirate king were running.

  She looked up, her eyes meeting his. Perhaps she sensed the fear in his gaze, or else a sixth sense informed her of the danger. Whatever the case, she dove to the side, pulling Erric with her. The mast crunched to the deck, crushing a portion of the wooden railing as it snapped in half, one side taking several crewmen with it as it plunged over the side and into the ocean.

  It missed her, it missed her, it missed—

  Grey was snapped from his relief as a scream of agony lit up the dark night. Shae shouted, “Grey!” A cry from his sister was all it took to snap him back into action. He would move mountain and ocean to get to her. A tentacle slapped at him, but he dodged, slamming his knife-hand into the rubbery flesh, dragging it back out amidst a gush of greenish-yellow pus-like blood. The tentacle recoiled for a moment, and it was all the time Grey needed to race past, leaping a spinning barrel and sliding across the slippery deck to where Shae was on her knees, trying to lift the mast.

  The thick wooden column pinned Erric’s leg to the deck.

  The pirate king’s mouth was open in agony, his screams a strangled gurgle now.

  “Help me!” Shae shouted, still trying to singlehandedly lift something that weighed a hundred times what she was capable of lifting. What either of them was capable of lifting, especially with Grey only having one hand to grip with.

  His mind raced as he tried to come up with a solution. If they had time and axes and saws, they could hack away at the mast until it was small enough or light enough to roll off…