← The Gilded Shore

Chapter 15

Chapter 15: The Night Before

Kahina

The corridors of Le Sanctuaire smell of heavy rosewater and stale candle grease, and they are scents designed to hide the rot. The indigo veil is across my face before I reach the side entrance, and inside it stays on. Walking into Armand's house tonight, of all nights, is the most dangerous thing I have done since the coast fell. Armand knows by now that Nico set a torch to his ledger; his men will be watching his own doors. But my aunt is inside these walls. She is the blood I had thought drowned, alive and chained in the one house I am about to sail away from forever, and I will not go without putting my arms around her. I move through the side entrance, and my slippers are silent on the carpet. My left-foot iron is not silent.

She is near the secondary exit, by a brass lamp, in her silver fish-scale dress. When she sees me her face does not stay serious; it breaks open, the way it broke in the corridor when she read my mother's veil. We have no time, and we both know it.

"You are leaving," she says. It is not a question.

"Tonight. Come with me." I already have her answer in the set of her shoulders. "There is room on the boat. We clear the harbor before dawn."

She shakes her head, slow. "I have been in this house twenty years. I know its doors and its locks, which guards drink and which watch. Out there I am an old woman with no country and no use, and they would have me back inside a week, and you with me. In here I am the one who hears things." Her dry hand finds my face. "You will need eyes in this city after tonight. Let me be them. I am worth more to you as a ghost in Armand's walls than as a passenger in your bunk."

I want to argue. There is no time, and she is right, and I have no answer to either.

"Then I am coming back for you," I say. "When this is done. When Armand is broken and my sisters are found, I am coming back to this house and I am taking you off this coast. Swear to me you will be alive when I do."

"I have stayed alive this long out of spite," she says, and the old court humor is under it, my father's humor, the family I thought was ash. "I can manage a while longer." She presses something into my hand, a thing of her own: a small worn medallion, warm from her skin. "Your great-grandmother's. It went into the sea with me. It comes back out with you. Now go, before they count me gone from the floor."

I close my hand around the metal. There is no embrace; a guard passes the end of the corridor, and we are both too disciplined to spend her life on one. I hold her gaze a moment, longer than is safe, and then I turn for the steps, and I do not let myself look back.

I walk down the limestone steps to the harbor. The left-foot iron is cold against my ankle on the stone. My great-grandmother's medallion is warm in my closed fist, the only thing I am glad to carry out of that house. The sight of the Sans Souci tied to the stone pier steadies my chest. Her white hull is clean against the gray cliffs and the dirty harbor water.

Nico is on the aft deck in the last of the evening light. He has thrown his formal coat onto the bench. His white sleeves are rolled to the elbows, and the muscles in his sun-dark forearms shift as he works the winch. The polished smile he wore in the salons is gone. His face is older tonight, and his jaw is set and quiet.

"Everything settled?" I ask, stepping onto the gangway.

"Settled enough," he says. He keeps his gaze on the winch, pulling the line tight. "We sail before first light," he says. "The crew is ready."

The iron on my left foot catches the pitch of the deck boards. Théo and his girls have made their camp on the deck forward, their laughter drifting over the cabin roof.

Night settles over the harbor, and the cabin below deck goes warm and close. A single beeswax candle burns on the teak desk, the flame throwing yellow across the bulkheads.

The rules are gone. The old agreements about who touches what and when are finished. Nico walked away from his father's name to stand with me, and that choice has stripped away the shields we carried.

I unlace the blue silk dress. The heavy fabric puddles on the deck boards, a discarded shell. Standing before him in the thin linen chemise, I make him look at the transparent fabric.

Nico sits on the edge of the narrow bunk, his boots off, his shirt half unbuttoned. He reaches out, his thumbs brushing the hollows of my collarbones, and draws the chemise down slowly. The linen falls to my feet.

I step between his knees. My hands find his stubbled jaw, sliding down his neck to his chest, where his heart thuds heavy and steady under my palm. The performance is over.

I push him back onto the narrow mattress and climb over him, my knees framing his hips. The chest I spent three weeks refusing to look at is solid under my hands.

"The trousers," I say.

His hands find my waist, his grip tight on my hips. I slide the wool trousers down his legs, exposing him. He is thick and hard, his skin hot. I take him in my hand. I spread the slick from the tip down his shaft, and I slide my palm along the ridge of him, holding him, easing him to the edge. His jaw goes tight.

"Kahina," he says.

He says it low and rough. I rub the wet of myself along his shaft until he groans, his knuckles turning white as he grips my thighs. I guide him to my opening, and I sink down.

The stretch is sharp and real, filling me. I ride him, and I grind my clitoris against his pubic bone. I set the pace, starting slow, then pressing faster as his hands leave my hips and cup my breasts.

"Some warning," he gasps, his chest rising fast under mine.

"You would not have liked it," I say.

I grind down, and a laugh escapes him. The vibration runs through my own body, and I laugh with him, both of us still moving as the wood of the bunk knocks against the bulkhead on the downbeat.

His hips lock. He calls my name again, the word torn from his throat as he releases, and he is hot and full inside me. I break around him, and I shake hard, dropping my forehead to his shoulder.

Afterward, we lie folded into the narrow bunk. My back is pressed to his chest, and his arm is heavy over my waist. His fingers are idle on my hip, and the boat rocks gently at its mooring. Out the stern ports, the cliff-lights of Seravalle go out one by one, and no one ashore marks the two of us slipping clear of the harbor. The name Malik is a distant problem for another woman in another harbor. I do not ask myself why I am still in his arms.

Tomorrow is fine. His arm is heavy over my waist, and I do not move it.

Nico

The dawn light is flat on the water, pale across our departure. The Sans Souci slips her mooring before the first light hits the limestone walls of Seravalle, the cliffs shrinking to a pale line astern. Her sails catch the wind with a heavy crack before they fill, the canvas stretching tight. I ease the wheel to port, the rudder biting into the tide.

This is an escape as much as a leaving. The harbor belongs to Armand Vellier. The city is his domain. We are clearing the bay while he still expects me to crawl back. I stand at the helm, the teak wheel warm under my palms. A cool wind presses my linen shirt flat against my chest. The crew moves in silence, reefing and trimming the sails. Nobody speaks above the work.

Forward, Théo and his girls are sleeping off the night. Théo clinked the last glasses at midnight. Now he is sprawled on his back, his arm slung over the forecastle hatch. The two girls from Le Cercle are curled beside him under a wool sailcloth. They look small in the thin dawn, their silk dresses stained with wine and salt. Théo asked nothing. He did not ask what Armand said, and he did not ask why I was throwing away the Valderre banks. He simply brought the champagne and stayed.

Kahina stands at the starboard rail in a thin silk slip, unlaced at the throat. Her mother's indigo veil is up, the one thing she chose herself in all the silk I put on her. Her black hair is tied back with a strip of dark ribbon. She does not look back at the lights of the city. Her gaze stays fixed on the dark water ahead. The left-foot iron is still locked to her ankle. The city tried to price her and keep her, and it is a grey smudge behind the stern now, but the metal stays.

Last night is still on my skin. I keep going back to the narrow bunk and the laugh that broke out of her at the worst possible moment. The rules we wrote are gone. My thighs still ache where she gripped them. She came to me direct, no performance, riding me with a slow, deliberate pace. When I gasped for warning, she laughed against my neck, and nothing has landed in me like that in years.

There is a joke somewhere in all this. I keep my mouth shut and let it go past.

Below deck, the Duke's letter sits on the chart table. The red wax seal is whole, the lion unbroken. I have not opened it. I leave it sealed because I have already gone past it. Whatever the betrothal and the Count's signature command inside, they command a man who no longer lives at that address. Ashore, my father's agents are writing the letters to freeze my accounts in Valderre and Seravalle, and Armand sits in his room at Le Cercle expecting me to crawl back when the money runs dry. They both believe the name and the gold are the only things holding me up. They do not know about Saverno. My mother left me money my father never thought to count, and for two years I have quietly spent it down the coast on a hull of my own, a deep-water ship with no Vellier anchor anywhere on her. She is the one thing I ever chose for myself, and when she is finished I will not need a single solari of theirs.

The wind comes off the open water with a salt cold that gets under the linen and reaches the skin.

I came out here once to vanish. Tonight I am not vanishing. I am sailing straight at the world I spent ten years dodging. We make for Saverno first, for the ship that is mine, and then for Valderre, where a man like Armand is taken apart in the open, by paper and by law.

At the rail Kahina stands with the wind off the sea in her hair, still carrying the name she gave me last night, Malik. I spent years sailing these waters for pleasure, letting the crates on my own deck go unread. The teak and the white sails are not toys anymore.

I look ahead. The horizon holds nothing but the line where the grey sea meets the greyer sky, and I steer for it.