Chapter 11
Chapter 11: What the Ally Knows
Kahina
The brass chandelier pours its light down onto Nico's stack of solari, and I stand behind his chair with one hand on the cool leather, watching him refuse to look at his cards. My mother's indigo veil sits close around my face. I am the only woman wearing one. The rest drift between the tables in lace and bare shoulders, priced by how little they cover. The iron on my left ankle has warmed to my blood by now, a dull weight under the hem of the violet silk. I have learned to walk as though the iron weighs nothing.
I bend to the curve of his ear. The emerald at my throat swings forward and taps the stiff silk of my bodice.
"I need a moment," I say, low, under the noise of the room.
Nico nods, his eyes on the cards, and pushes three coins into the pot with his thumb. He does not ask where I am going.
I straighten and turn for the carved oak screen at the far wall, walking at the pace my mother drilled into her daughters before our walls came down: the unhurried carriage of a woman who expects eyes on her back and gives them nothing. A merchant in a velvet doublet pauses with his goblet halfway to his mouth. I look past him. The folded paper the silver-scaled woman pressed into my palm an hour ago, in the crush by the stairs, named this corridor and this hour.
Behind the screen the passage is dim, the velvet drapes holding back the salon's light. A single tallow candle gutters in an iron bracket on the wall. Vinegar and wet limestone rise off the stone. I slip past the narrow pantry doors, my slippers silent on the flagstones, the smell of roasted mutton and spilled wine thinning into the cold draft of the service stairs. At the bend, where the passage turns toward the kitchens, sits a shallow alcove where the waiters stack empty crates and no one lingers.
She is waiting in the dark of it. The same woman who found me at Madame Eclaire's and put the name of this house in my ear. She wears a gown of dull silver fish-scale, her face is thick with white powder, and her eyes are ringed and exhausted. She has scraped a hard life out of these windowless rooms and means to go on living it, which is why she only ever finds me where no light reaches.
Somewhere above the cliffs the first thunder breaks, long and low, and the candle in its bracket shudders. She glances at the bend in the passage, at the dark stairs. Every breath she spends here is borrowed against her own neck.
"Quickly," she says. "There is not much time, and you must not be seen with me."
Her hand comes out of her sleeve and closes around mine. Her grip is cold and dry, and her palm is callused. Then her eyes go to the veil at my face, the indigo my mother dyed and wore, and they stop there, and her powdered face goes loose in a way I have not seen on anyone since I came to this coast.
"I know that cloth," she says, low. "I knew the woman who first wore it. I held you once, when you were a child too small to keep, before the sea took me off that shore. I am your father's cousin, Kahina. I am the one your house mourned as drowned."
The corridor tilts under me. The name I have for her is a name spoken at funerals, a face in a story. She is the aunt the corsairs carried off in the year before I could walk, and we grieved her with no body to bury. She has been alive this whole time, alive and in chains in this very house, and the proof of it is her cold hand around mine.
"They told us you were dead," I say. My voice does not hold.
"I let them. It is how I lived." Her nails press into my wrist. "But you have not broken, and I have one thing left worth spending, and I will spend it on you. The Red Hawk. Captain Malik. He runs the western route, three days out from the southern coast, his holds packed with chains and stolen weight. He is the man who burned your home and took your sisters off it."
The name goes into me and stays. Malik. I hold my face smooth under the court mask my mother fitted on me before I had breasts, but behind my ribs the name presses like a seal on hot wax. The smell of burning cedar comes back to me, and I hear my sisters screaming through the surf. The red sails stand off our shore in the grey before dawn, and the city wakes too late.
"Hate him after," my aunt says, reading my face the way blood reads blood. "Hear me first. Malik is the only man living who knows which buyers took your sisters, and to what ports. Kill him and you bury that with him. He is the man you most want dead and the man you can least afford to lose. Do not forget that when the wanting comes for you."
Thunder breaks again, nearer, and she flinches toward the stairs.
"Armand's broken-masted ship still lies at the harbor," she says, fast now. "Moret captains her. He carries Malik's cargo on Malik's route, and he sails west at dawn. Reach Moret, and you have the Hawk's wake to follow. Now go, before they count me missing from the floor."
She lets go of my hand and slips back into the deeper shadow of the stairs, the hem of her gown dragging on the stone, and then she is gone, and I do not know when I will see her again, or whether I ever will.
I already have Moret. Armand handed me the captain and the dawn himself, an hour ago, pleased with his own generosity. What I did not have until now is the name above Moret, and the blood that put it in my hand. Moret is the rung, and Malik is the height. My aunt, alive in this house all these years, is a weight I did not walk in carrying.
I stand alone in the cold corridor with my hand flat against the wet lime of the wall. My fingers want to shake. I press them harder into the stone until the wanting passes, and I draw three slow breaths that taste of dust and old grease. I straighten the mask, and I tuck the loose strand of hair back under the gold pin before I lift my chin.
The road to Malik runs through the card room, and Nico holds the road. I have his mother's gold at my throat and his name to spend, and before the sun clears the cliffs I need both of them pointed at the harbor.
I step back into the yellow blaze of the salon. The hum and clink of it strikes my ears, but my stride stays smooth. Nico sits where I left him, his dark head catching the light, relaxed against the leather. I cross to him and lay my hand on the polished wood beside his solari. He tilts his head, his fingers pausing on his cards, and slides a single gold piece across the felt until it touches my fingernail.
Then he looks at my hand, at the knuckles gone white against the wood. He does not ask who met me in the dark, or what the house took from me in the time I was gone. He covers my hand with his. His palm is warm. Mine is ice, and the cold of it does not move him. He turns my hand over and lays his thumb against the inside of my wrist, where the beat under my skin is too quick, and he holds it there, steady, until it slows under his thumb.
He sweeps the solari into his pocket, tosses a coin to the dealer, and lays his cards face down on the felt.
"With three sixes?" Sandro says, his brows climbing. "You insult the man's whole table."
"Sleep it off on your yacht," Théo says, already turning toward a woman in silver lace. "More room for my comeback."
Nico says nothing. He stands and draws me up with him, his grip closing warm over my cold fingers, and we leave the gold and the smoke behind us. Past the terrace doors the rain has come on hard while we played, loud on the canvas awnings and the limestone steps, and the night air is all wet stone and the salt of the sea below.
Kahina
The rain takes us before we are halfway up the street, falling hard and cold off the eaves, and Nico does not run, so I do not run either. By the time he gets the brass key into his own door we are soaked to the skin. My violet silk hangs heavy off my shoulders. The veil clings dark and wet to my hair. The iron on my ankle has gone cold with the storm, and the wet metal bites into the raw skin beneath. Every step up to the door drags the weight across the bone.
Inside, the apartment is dark and empty. The staff were sent home before we left for Le Sanctuaire, and the rooms are cold, smelling of beeswax and the lilies dying in their silver urns. Nico crouches at the hearth and coaxes the banked coals up until a flame catches and throws orange light across the green damask walls. This is the same room where I knelt for him this afternoon and stood and walked away before he could finish, and the ache I left there wakes again, low and insistent, now that I am cold and tired and out from under the salon's bright light.
"Take that off before it kills you," he says, not turning. He means the soaked silk.
I lift the wet veil from my hair and lay it over the settee, then work the brass loops down my spine with stiff fingers until the violet taffeta peels away and drops to the parquet. The iron stays, and it always stays. I stand by the fire in my thin shift, and the silk is gone near to glass against my body. I shiver, while behind me Nico drags his own wet shirt over his head and works the trousers down and steps out of them, careless of being looked at.
He straightens, bare in the firelight, and I let myself look at him the way I have refused to since the cove. The breadth of his shoulders and the muscle a life of sail has laid across his chest are clear in the orange light, and the dark hair runs down his belly. The heavy weight of his cock is half-hard in the orange glow. Tonight the want comes up plain and I do not fight it. It pulls low behind my hips, and I have to set my feet on the cold parquet.
"You smiled at Armand tonight," he says, low, the joke gone out of his voice. "Gave that monster more warmth than you have ever once given me."
There is a clever answer to that. I have used it before in my father's courts, where a woman smiles at the executioner until she finds the strength to lift the axe. It is true, and it is armor, and I am so tired of wearing armor. I let it go. There is only one last thing I keep, because I must.
"At dawn I need the harbor," I say. "There is a ship sailing west, and a guard at the quay who will turn me away and bow to you. Get me past him before the sun clears the cliffs."
"Done," he says. He does not ask why.
And that is the end of my cleverness for the night.
I cross the floor and put my hands on him because they have wanted to for weeks and I am done telling them no. His body is cold from the rain and warms fast under my palms. He makes a low sound, and then his mouth is on mine and I am kissing him back because his mouth is warm and I want it. He lifts the wet shift up and off me, and there is nothing left between us. His bare chest presses against my breasts, and his hands are hot and broad down my back, gripping my hips to pull me into him. The hard length of him presses against my belly and a sound breaks out of me I do not trouble to hold. His mouth moves to my throat, my collarbone, the rise of my breast, and I push my fingers into his wet hair and hold him there.
And something that has been clenched in me since the red sails came begins to let go.
He feels it before I can say it, the way I have stopped steering and started only wanting, and he answers it with his hands and his mouth and nothing held back but the one thing. He lays me down on the wool before the fire. He works his way down me slow, his mouth at my breasts, my belly, the inside of my thigh, his broad hands holding my hips still when they start to lift. When his mouth finds me I am already past pretending, and I push up into it and let the sound out of my throat, and the rain answers on the glass, and the thunder rolls in off the cliffs and shakes the glass in its frame.
He gives and gives, and he asks for nothing back. Two fingers are inside me, and his tongue works. His free hand is spread flat over my heart where it beats hard, and I climb fast, faster than I have ever let myself, because for once there is no door to watch and no axe to lift and nothing in the world but the heat he is building in me.
And when it breaks it takes everything with it.
I come apart on his mouth and on his hand, and in the same breath the fist I have made of my whole self since the coast fell finally opens. All of it opens at once, and the climax and the grief come up the same narrow channel. My jaw had been held hard for weeks. My shoulders had ridden up around my ears since the day they put the irons on me. It lets go in a rush I cannot stop and do not try to, and I am shaking and crying, clutching at his shoulders. The pleasure and the weeping are the same thing, and there is no line drawn between them. He comes up over me and gathers me in while it runs through me, holds me through the climax and through the collapse on its far side, his arms tight, his voice low at my ear, riding it out with me until the shaking slows.
I have not let anyone hold me since my mother, when she would wrap me in the warm, dried wool from the solar after the baths. My body had stopped expecting that safety. Now the warmth floods back, sudden and unbearable, and I let it happen.
He does not take the last thing, though I feel how badly he wants to, hard and ready against my hip the whole time. He could. I would let him. He does not. Instead he draws me down into the curl of his body before the fire, his chest to my back, one heavy arm across my ribs, his knees tucked under mine until I am gathered small into all that heavy heat. The want is still there, his and mine, alive and unspent, and for once I do not mind. He has given me everything but that, and he does not take it. It is one thing left whole on a night I came apart in his hands.
I let go of the rest: the captain and the name, the dawn and the mask, and the count of the exits. There is only the fire on my face and his slow heart against my spine. His breath is warm at the back of my neck, and the great bulk of him is curled around me. I have been the sharpest thing in every room since they took me, wanting nothing I could not put to use, and I am so tired, and here, naked and held and wanting only this, I stop. I press back into him until there is no space left, and his arm tightens, and I let a man hold the weight I have carried alone since the coast fell.
"Sleep," he says against my shoulder. "I have you."
And I believe him. Somewhere past the rain a ship is making ready, and it will still be there when the sun comes up. Tonight they cannot have me. The iron on my ankle has gone warm at last against his leg, and for three hours I am no one's soldier and no one's cargo, only a woman gone soft and unclenched in the arms of a man who has me, and I do not dream of the sea.