Getting into Charenton had taken a few hours, securing quarters at an inn another few more. Securing passage on a ship had taken most of the next day, with Luce choosing five potential captains and Eloise choosing from among them, to ensure that neither of them could direct the other onto a hostile ship. Getting to the point that he felt halfway alive again had taken the longest, and Luce still wasn’t sure he was all the way there.

“What’s in this broth? It tastes amazing.”

Eloise’s lips curled up slightly, barely noticeable. “Fish.”

That was probably sarcasm, but it was difficult to tell.

“It actually is,” she assured. “Just, you know, seasoned and cooked with vegetables and stuff. Beats the fuck out of gnawing on those bony little guppies every night, doesn’t it?”

“You were the one catching them.” Luce took a sip from the bowl—apparently they didn’t serve it with a spoon here—then set it back at the table.

For once, the day was fair, and the inn’s common room was empty. Even the proprietor had retired after doling out the last ladles of the evening meal, leaving only the two of them to discuss their arrangements with some semblance of privacy.

“Next time I won’t. See how well you fare then.” She set her empty bowl aside, clearing a space for herself on the table between them.

“I think if there’s a next time at all, everything that possibly can go horribly wrong will already have.” He drained the last of his broth. “The species of fish we eat won’t exactly matter in a world of ruin where existence itself is suffering.”

“Are you sure? Small comforts matter all the more when the whole world’s gone to shit.” She tilted her head back. “Which is basically all the time, I guess.”

“There’s degrees, surely. I’m not exactly delighted by our circumstances, but we did get out. We’ve got a fresh meal, a warm roof over our heads for the night, and a path back to Malin before long. It isn’t as if Khali’s returned and blackened out the sky.”

“Give it time.” She smiled, pulling out a stack of blank paper and a fountain pen. “I’m still half afraid that when I close my eyes tonight, I’ll hear another explosion tear my life to shit.”

Luce sat up when he noticed. “What are you doing?”

“Dreading what’s to come. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s a very productive activity. You should try it.”

As if I don’t do enough of that already. “I’m talking about the pen and paper. Are you writing a letter?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Not that it’s any of your concern, but yes.”

“Fantastic.” Luce sighed. “Do you not see why that’s a problem?”

“The very thought of a literate commoner terrifies and enrages your royal blood? If that’s so, you’ll probably want to have words with your country, since I learned from Lord Airion’s School for the Tragically Orphaned.” Did Uncle Miles really call it that?

“No.” He placed his hand to his face. “If you’re sending out letters to acquaintances, you could be setting up an ambush. The fact that you tried to get me not to notice isn’t very reassuring either.”

“Please, it has nothing to do with that. That letter I’m sending a trained pigeon for. It’s an old pirate tradition.” She smirked as she picked up the pen. “This is just reaching out to an old friend in Malin.”

“In Malin?” Luce clenched his fists. “Why? We’re heading there anyway! Can’t it just wait a week?”

“No.” Eloise turned her head down towards the paper and began to write.

“I’m extending you a lot of trust, taking you along this far. Working to get that ransom so you don’t come after me again.”

“Extend a little more,” she said without looking up from the page. “You can write a letter if you want. I don’t care. I’ve trusted you this far not to reveal yourself and call the guards on me.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

Luce took a deep breath. “Look, and I don’t know if this isn’t clear, but you can leave at any time. If you’re that worried about it, then just walk away.”

“With nothing.”

“Sure, but you’re choosing not to. It’s a calculated risk for you, with a large reward in the balance. I get nothing from you sending out letters to your pirate buddies, and if it’s instructions to find our ship, I stand to lose fucking everything.”

“Ah.” Finally, she pulled her head away from the letter. “That sort of atmosphere of distrust might be just the thing to prompt a prince to pull out of his promise, fetch the guards.”

“It just might.” He reached his hand across the table. “If it’s really that innocuous, why can’t it just wait?”

Eloise frowned. “I want someone specific to meet me when we get there. Before any of my other… associates. If I mail it now, I’m giving them enough notice for it not to be an issue.”

“That doesn’t sound important enough to be worth the risk.”

“What risk? Honestly, Luce, what the fuck do I stand to gain by doing that? You’re taking me to get my ransom anyway.”

Safety. Leverage. A feeling of victory to make up for your failure, however hollow it is or however little difference it makes. “Who’s it even for? Not that girl you left behind after she gave me that book?”

“Her?” Eloise snorted. “Definitely not. She wanted out of this whole life, I could tell. Me included. I don’t know if she’s even there anymore, and I doubt we’d have anything to say to each other if she is. The girl of the moment never lasts; that’s the point. They wear out their welcome or I do, either way, and then it’s time for the next.”

“That’s a lot of reasons,” Luce noted. “One of your smuggling buddies then? Another pirate?”

“No. Just a friend, really.” She picked up her pen, paused, then set it down. “Look, I didn’t exactly get my start at sea, alright? I had people there, commitments.”

“In the criminal underworld, no doubt,” he said, unimpressed. “Probably stealing as we speak.”

“Less than you’d think, honestly. Before I met Captain Verrou, before I escaped, I was mostly managing the account books for a candle shop.”

“The horror!”

She frowned. “It was stifling. Interesting work, sure, and I was treated fairly. Pay was fine, enough for what I needed anyway. But—” She glanced down at the letter, then tilted her head back.

“Clochaîne, right? That’s the surname Cya tried to give you. The man who raised you, and named you his successor?”

“Fucking spirits,” she muttered. “Jacques, we all called him. He saw something in me, I guess. But it was my mom who raised us, till your lot hanged her anyway. Dad did his best too, even if he wasn’t in much condition to help. When she died, someone had to step up so we didn’t starve. Just my luck I got a job selling candles instead of unloading ships at the docks or something.

This is why your approach is so self destructive, Perimont. You’re creating enemies with every execution. Luce winced, trying to pick his words carefully. “I think it’s very noble that you went to help your family like that. Especially at such a young… How old were you?”

“Fourteen, fifteen.” She shrugged. “Nothing noble about it. I had to eat, Dad had to eat, Margot had to eat… In a year I was doing Jacques’s books, and in another two I was managing supplies for his whole business. By the time I met Captain Verrou, Jacques was even talking to me about getting me set up with a shop of my own, to run as I pleased.”

“So why didn’t you do it? I mean, maybe I’m missing something here, but—”

“You’re missing the wear of it, day after day. No changes, no progress. Stagnant, save the entanglements that just kept getting worse and worse. More depending on me, waiting on my signature, more people getting more and more attached… It’s too much. Nothing I was doing mattered, and I was only sinking deeper every day. Clochaîne never understood that because whatever ambition he once had was long gone by the time I met him. He had his city, and that sufficed. When he fought, it was merely to preserve what he had.”

“His city? Didn’t you say he was a candle salesman? And for that matter, how would you have possibly met a notorious pirate captain in a job like that?”

Eloise shrugged. “Not trying to give you the whole story of my life. Just explaining this letter.”

“Are you? I fail to see the connection.”

“Right.” Her posture sagged. “Well, those entanglements? Obligations and responsibilities? Not all of those people took it that well. Not just Jacques, but every wolf in his pack. Too much was going through me, and they didn’t seem to get that that was exactly the reason I had to go.”

How could someone just run away from their whole life like that? Even with the weight of Avalon and its history on his shoulders, Luce had never once felt the urge to just pack up and leave. You can’t fix anything, doing that.

“This guy—” She tapped the half-written letter in front of her. “He gets it. Always did, I think.”

“That—” Luce searched for the right words that could convey his point without being insensitive. “That sounds like a trivial concern, though?”

Eloise’s stare in response felt like it was cutting through him.

“I just mean, you can meet him later, can’t you?”

She frowned. “The moment I step foot in Malin, it’s only a matter of time before one of Jacques’s wolves finds me. And not all of them were as polite about me leaving as he was.” She sighed. “You really can’t just trust me on this?”

“I— I suppose maybe if I read it first?”

“No.” She snatched the paper away. “You know enough as it is.”

“Not that one, then. But write something new you wouldn’t mind me seeing. Then I can rewrite it in my own words and send it out.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Rewrite it?”

“To mess up anything you might try to slip by, writing in code.”

Eloise nodded approvingly. “Nice catch, genuinely. I guess I can agree to that.” She spent a minute scratching down a replacement letter, then threw the first atop the simmering embers of the fire in the hearth.

Luce grabbed it when she was done, looking it over carefully, but there was almost nothing to see. Just a few paragraphs saying they’d arrive in Malin in a week, and to meet in the old Great Temple at midnight when they did.

Easier to rule out anything in code that way, at least. With more extraneous details it would have been easier to slip in a mention of a brother that didn’t exist or an event that never happened, as a tip-off to the recipient.

“With everything that you had,” he asked as he folded the new letter, “why give it all up?”

“I had to be free.” She shrugged. “I think everyone does, in the end.”

Then why are you still here with me?

≋

“Wow, it’s really sinking into the water.” The entire temple had once been a monument to a water spirit, a place where people had gathered together to convene and give offerings, when they weren’t too busy with ritual human sacrifice.

Certainly, there was no small satisfaction in seeing it in ruins.

“Why would they build a temple on the shore like this?” The cool ocean breeze was appreciated now, since it turned out that when Harold had called Malin ‘sunny’, he’d meant that it burned with the torturous fire of the Sun Spirit himself. Staying here through the summer would be even more fun, with that in mind.

But a summer breeze was hardly worth the cost of constructing a monument at the water’s edge, as evidenced by the state of it now.

“Well, the Leclaires used to maintain it. Worked fine then, and now there’s none of them left to mourn the state it’s in. We’re lucky a lot of their other shit didn’t need the maintenance to last this long.”

“Ah, like those tunnels we went through.” Suddenly, those inexplicable passages burrowing their way through the earth spirit made a lot more sense. “I take it they were some kind of sewer system?”

Eloise blinked. “Wow, you’ve got it. That’s why they smelled so horrific. And were too small for humans to walk through.”

“Well, what are they for, then?” Obviously, now, they let people travel through the city undetected, but they surely hadn’t been designed and excavated for that.

She smiled. “You notice that it’s so fucking hot you can barely move?”

“Of course.”

“Apparently before the Foxtrap, they used to pull up water from under the gardens and disperse it back into the air like mist. Cooled the whole damned city off, and all they had to do was run around underground for a few hours blasting it through. There was some irrigation stuff too, I think, but the mist is what people remember.”

“Mist powered by the sacrifice of untold human lives!”

“Eh.” Eloise shrugged. “What’s the difference, if they were going to die anyway? Might as well get some benefit out of it.”

Luce bit his tongue. “Some relief from the heat does sound nice,” he said diplomatically.

Luce hid when Eloise’s friend Claude arrived, so as to better set him at ease. It didn’t hurt that this way, if there was a trap being sprung, Claude might let it slip before Eloise could explain the situation.

But at this point, it seemed pretty unlikely.

It seemed that the run of luck he’d been on ever since finding those woodsmen was continuing, though, because they talked for what felt like hours, without the slightest indication of any treachery. Eloise was mostly reminiscing and catching up with him, though she did take the time to explain the role he would need to play.

Eloise hadn’t wanted to follow Luce into Perimont’s office, which was honestly fair enough, so they needed a third party to bring the terms of negotiation to him before the ransom could be secured. A bit of extra trouble, perhaps, but at this point he was just ready for it all to be over.

Then the other pirate arrived, the black haired girl who’d given him Olwen’s Song to read, sprinting up the beach out of nowhere. The person who’d killed Cassia, and had the slight decency to feel guilty about it.

How did she know to find us here?

“Hey killer,” Eloise greeted her with her usual charm. “Did you miss me?”

‘Killer’ blinked, clearly taken aback. “I thought you were dead. You know they caught your ship off the coast of Avalon? Everyone was executed…”

“First good news I’ve heard in a while.” Eloise laughed. “Those fuckers kicked me off my own fucking ship. Serves them right.” I knew it!

“They what?”

“Yeah, turns out pirates don’t love a steady job, even if the money’s better. When Prince Lucy blew a giant hole in it and threw himself off the deck, that was apparently the last straw. They couldn’t appreciate what a good thing we had going.”

“So why didn’t they vote to stop doing it? It’s not like you were forcing them against their will.”

Eloise sucked in air through her teeth. “Yeah, well, voting doesn’t really work if the majority are fucking idiots. I was the Captain, and I knew better than them. If they didn’t like it, they could leave.”

“And many of them did,” Luce added, stepping out of the shadows. “I saw new faces every time I came up from belowdecks.”

“Fuck!” ‘Killer’ jumped when she saw him. “Does anyone ever actually die? Khali’s curse.”

What is she talking about? “Did people find out about my kidnapping?”

“Yeah, you could say that. They didn’t exactly miss that it was your ship being crewed by pirates. The fact you weren’t on it had most people give you up for dead. Shit, I was just talking to a bunch of your people doing exactly that.”

“You were?” Eloise said incredulously.

“Who?” Luce added.

“Captain Whitbey, Sir Gerald Stewart, Perimont…” I haven’t seen any of them in years. Well, other than Gary, but his memory was about as fallible as it was humanly possible to be. Would they even recognize me, if I’m presumed dead?

“You talked to Perimont,” Eloise said flatly.

“Well, the younger one. Simon, I mean. And his sister Mary a bit too, but she was mostly doing her own thing.”

“How the fuck—”

“Look, it’s not important. Jacques is going to kill Claude if we don’t get him out of the city immediately. Yse told me like it was a done deal. Too much of a fucking coward to cross Jacques over it. This was the last place I could think to check.”

Jacques Clochaîne the benign candle magnate? Eloise had definitely taken some liberties in her story. It was a name to watch out for, if he made it out of this mess.

“Alright.” Eloise breathed deep. “This is fine. The ship we took sets sail for Guerron tomorrow. From there Claude can get passage to anywhere outside Avalon’s control. It looks like you have enough for fare and “no questions asked”, so we can get him on it.”

“I don’t understand,” Claude muttered, head in his hands. “I didn’t say anything! I didn’t do anything! Nothing that would go against Mr. Clochaîne, or Pierre.”

“They got your name,” the girl said. “They have this crazy ripped genius detective poring over every inch of the railyard heist, and they figured out you were arrested the same night it happened. That’s all it takes, apparently. That’s the loyalty Jacques shows to the people that serve him.”

Did someone rob the railroad? As technology went, it was far from the worst to fall into the wrong hands, since building the networks depended so heavily on existing infrastructure for it, but if there were any schematics of the internal combustion engines…

I’ll deal with it if I make it through today, he assured himself, adding yet another problem to a list that already felt a mile long. This would be hard enough already.

“I can see the logic. Nothing worse than a rat, after all.” Eloise clenched her fists, staring down at Claude. “But leaving town would work just as well. And he has to know you wouldn’t say anything.”

“I’m sure he just doesn’t care.”

Sounds like he’d make an excellent Governor.

“Look, Eloise, I’ll take care of him. Just tell me the ship and I’ll take him now. And then…”

“Then there’s nothing more to say.”

“What?” Luce stepped closer to them. “We need her, don’t we? Claude can’t exactly negotiate with the Governor if he’s busy fleeing the country.” He turned. “Could you talk to Simon again? Or his father?”

“Trivially.” The girl folded her arms, something about the pose strangely familiar.

“I don’t know…” Eloise scratched the back of her neck. “It might be better if you’re not involved with this.”

The girl sighed. “I’m the one who found him, and killed his cousin. I’m about as involved as it gets.”

She wasn’t wrong.