A moment passed as Navi digested this. “Can you do that? Hide an entire ship?”

“It is what I was born to do. Not to take vengeance upon humans or serve a mad emperor. I was born to serve her, to love her. This is what I believe. I will bear you to the Sun Queen so you may fight alongside her and help her win this war at last. That is the great culmination of all my long years, the reward for that endless age in the Deep. To serve the world’s great hope and guard her friends with all the strength granted by what power I have left.”

Navi looked at her hands through a sheen of tears. Humbled, she found her voice slowly. “You are very brave, Zahra. And if you argue with me, I’ll get angry.”

Zahra laughed. A tender coolness brushed Navi’s arm.

In silence, they watched the waves darken as behind them the sun joined the horizon. While the light dimmed, Navi fixed an image in her mind and sent it clumsily in Zahra’s direction: Herself, and Zahra as she once was, standing beside her. Navi’s head resting against her arm, their fingers bound in friendship, their twin devoted hearts yearning east.

• • •

The night was deep in darkness when Navi at last felt well enough to visit the captain’s quarters. The night was quiet. Crew members were at their assigned posts, the waves steady as they crashed and curled.

Navi wished her own heart were as steady. How it fluttered, how it tightened her chest and throat. She touched the latch on Ysabet’s door. Wandering the deck after leaving Zahra, she had let her mind ask its questions, imagining every probable doom and possible triumph. She had thought of everything that had happened and everything that would. Zahra had told her of Harkan, how he had died under her care. How Simon had stood cold-eyed at the pier and slain their friends and allies. A pet of the Emperor, declaring devotion even as he plotted betrayal.

Navi could not think too closely of that. She knew of Eliana’s feelings for Simon. The death on the beach would have been awful to witness, the realization of her failure a gut punch—but to watch Simon kill their friends, to understand who truly had his loyalty, would have been the most vicious devastation. It was a rare thing, to find someone to trust, someone to receive your love and protect it. Navi knew that truth all too well. And then to have that trust broken, that love proven to be a lie…

Navi would reject violence altogether if she could. But if she met Simon again, she would kill him.

She knocked on Ysabet’s door and stepped inside.

Ysabet sat at her desk, its surface strewn with food inventories, weapons registers, maps of the sea and stars.

She turned from her work with a broad smile. “There you are. How do you feel? Would you like more of my wondrous tea?”

Navi pushed on before she could lose her nerve. A rare thing indeed, to find someone she could trust. Someone who would, perhaps, receive her love and protect it.

“What I would like,” she said, her voice shaking only a little, “is to do something I fear may come across as presumptuous.”

At once, the room changed, the air between them pulling tight. A gilded string, taut and singing.

Ysabet leaned back in her chair, her brown eyes bright with candlelight. “Presume away, princess.”

Navi took a moment to breathe, to steady her hands, and then undid the clasp of her cloak. It fell to her feet. “We sail to war, and possibly to our deaths.”

“Yes,” Ysabet agreed, rapt.

“I told you in my tent that it has been too long since I’ve been loved kindly.” Navi slipped off her boots, undid her trousers, slid them off. Bare-legged in her tunic, she watched Ysabet’s mouth part, the curve of her lips.

Ysabet’s chest rose faster. “Yes.”

Navi unbuttoned her tunic’s collar, then drew it up over her head. Naked, she asked Ysabet a silent question.

“Yes,” Ysabet whispered, and then watched in wonder as Navi settled gently in her lap.

Ysabet’s hands came to her at once—one on her hip, the other fingering the ends of her hair. “My God, Navi,” she said hoarsely. “You will kill me this night. Look at you.”

“Yes, look at me. See me when I tell you this.” Navi stroked the silken arches of Ysabet’s pale brows. “I also said in my tent that it was not only about lying with you, and you said the same.”

She had never seen Ysabet’s face so soft, as if all her barbs, all her bravado, had melted away at Navi’s touch.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Navi lowered her mouth to Ysabet’s temple. “Is it possible to love someone you have known for only a few weeks?”

“Yes. Yes.” Ysabet fumbled for Navi’s face, clumsy in her ardor. She kissed Navi’s chin, her jaw, her neck.

“If I am to die soon,” said Navi, her eyes falling shut, “I would like to meet it with the memory of you in my mind.”

Ysabet’s voice floated up to her, thick with emotion. “Yes.” She slid her hand up Navi’s bare back, tracing the scarred line of her spine. “Yes.” She drew Navi down for a kiss, and Navi whimpered against her mouth, for she felt silken and flushed in Ysabet’s arms, safe as she had so seldom felt. Even in war, there could be this—love, and hope, and the simplicity of pleasure.

She laughed, joy bubbling to her toes. “Can you say nothing else?” she teased.

Ysabet touched Navi’s face, looking up at her as if gazing upon all the world’s marvels. “Kiss me,” she said, a tiny plea in her voice, an incredulous little bend, as if she could not quite believe what she held.

Navi smiled, ran her fingers once more through Ysabet’s soft white hair, and bent to obey.

28

   Eliana

“I cannot tell my father or my brothers, not yet, for I don’t want to raise their hopes prematurely. But I have been visited in secret by one of the Emperor’s lieutenants, and he says I am beautiful enough to earn a place in the Emperor’s palace as a favored guest! He may summon me today, in fact, and I know just what dress to wear, red like—”

—The last journal entry of Demetra Vassos, human citizen of Elysium, dated April 3, Year 1018 of the Third Age

In Eliana’s shapeless, quiet dream, a single word: Run.

Her eyes flew open. Someone was dragging her across her bed, upending her pillows. She tried to wrench free and couldn’t. The hand around her ankle was firm and cold.

She saw Corien’s face, how giddy it was, the manic edge of his smile. Her bedsheets tangled around her legs. He yanked her hard over the edge of her bed and stalked away, letting her fall.

“Get up. And do something with that tangled hair of yours. You look feral.” He was rifling through her enormous wardrobe, shoving past gown after gown. “I have a gift for you, but you must be properly outfitted to receive it.”