Ben grinned. “We already are irmáns.”
Brothers.
Ben was thirteen, crouched against the keyhole to his father’s study.
“Rodrigu freed war prisoners . . . he bought and sold Grace Loray’s evil magic . . . he was an ally of our enemies, a traitor to the crown, a tool of the Devil . . . and his son was, too.”
They wouldn’t let Ben see either Rodrigu or Paxben in the holding cells. Defensors barred him at the door, Elazar comforting him with a hand on his shoulder.
“I tried to reason with your uncle and cousin,” Elazar said. “They are beyond redemption. The Pious God rewards those who uphold his purity at the cost of great personal suffering. We must expunge Rodrigu’s and Paxben’s souls, Benat, and the Pious God will bless you for the pain you feel.”
Ben didn’t see either of them until the burning. Elazar allowed him to watch from as close as he liked—“For catharsis,” his father had said. Ben stood at the front of the horde.
“Nos purificar!” people screamed. Purify us.
Others, “Queimar os herexes!” Burn the heretics.
Ben watched Church defensors drag Rodrigu out of the wagon they used to transport the condemned from the holding cells. He was no longer the vivacious mountain of a man who had thundered after Ben and Paxben as they played hide-and-seek in the gardens. No longer the resolute politician who had guided Elazar through the ongoing revolution on Grace Loray. He was now what the Church had uncovered his soul to be: impure.
Purple bruises rimmed both eyes. Lacerations and dried blood covered his body. He stumbled, so weak that defensors had to carry him.
He didn’t speak, though, until they dragged out Paxben.
Bile rose in Ben’s throat. Paxben spat and kicked against the defensors. Shackles bound his wrists and cloth covered his mouth, drawing Ben’s attention to the marking on Paxben’s face. No, not a marking—as Paxben fought, the blood-covered bandage slipped, revealing gashes through his eye.
Rodrigu screamed. Begged. “Let him go! Asentzio, for the love of god, don’t do this—”
Ben looked back, over the long expanse of people between the front of the crowd and the steps of Grace Neus Cathedral. There his father stood, too distant for Ben to see if he reacted to Rodrigu using his first name.
He was glad that defensors had gagged Paxben.
Defensors flung Rodrigu against a stake and looped rope around his body. He turned toward Paxben, who had to be tossed back into the wagon so the defensors could regain control.
“Let him go!” Rodrigu shrieked as they yanked a bag over his head.
Defensors dragged Paxben out of the wagon again, a bag over his head now too, dishonor defined. They tied him to a stake next to his father, and a defensor with a torch approached. The smoke stung Ben’s nose.
The man passed Rodrigu but didn’t light his pyre.
Rodrigu’s hysteria broke. “DON’T KILL MY SON!”
Ben drew in the stench of smoke, holding it when his stomach heaved.
“They are heretics, Benat,” his father had said before they’d left the palace that morning. “As you watch, remember that. We will be blessed from the pain of sacrificing them.”
Ben watched his uncle and cousin burn to death. He imprinted every flame in his mind and used the heat to scald out the pain—if the Pious God could make blessings come from that pain, he didn’t want it. Nothing good was worth Paxben’s and Rodrigu’s deaths.
Ben had watched them burn. He had watched them die.
It was a dream, standing on the deck of the Astuto, the world drenched in black but for the lantern in his hand that chased the shadows from the faces of the two people before him.
A woman he didn’t know, and a man. Ben had spent six years trying to forget that face, and it was older now, so maybe it was a trick—but his heart pushed out a name that was a prayer he’d sworn to never utter again.
“Paxben?”
The man—ghost—smiled, because Paxben would smile, because few of Ben’s memories of him existed without a radiance that rivaled the sun.
Reality rushed at Ben and he shifted back, bumping into someone coming up the stairs behind him. Jakes settled a hand on his hip. Ben didn’t have the strength to push him off.
“My prince?” Jakes said. “What—”
Chaos. Jakes shouting, “Intruders!” Lanterns illuminating the deck and weapons rattling and feet pounding.
Paxben’s sad, broken smile remained.
“Ben,” he finally said. Defensors grabbed his arms. “Irmán.”
30
THE ARGRIDIANS STRIPPED them of their weapons and Lu’s satchel, which she forced herself to let them take. She could replace the objects within, even the family stone from the Tuncian sanctuary. Still, she hated the thought of the Argridians having it.
The cell where the defensors imprisoned her and Vex was clean, unused, letting Lu feel only annoyance at how close they were to the Rapid Meander. Through that wall, up, within swimming distance. Had Nayeli heard the uproar? Did she know the Argridians had caught them?
Focusing on those minor things helped steady Lu. The last time she had been at the mercy of defensors had been during the revolution, when Tom had scalded into her mind the importance of avoiding anyone wearing navy uniforms with the white curved V and crossed swords.
Now not only was she a prisoner of the Argridians, she was at the mercy of the Crown Prince himself. The man who had recognized Vex.
Lu listened as the defensors’ footsteps receded up the wooden stairs before she rounded on Vex. He had gone pale, his eye on the hall before their cell’s bars as though he expected the prince to materialize at any moment.
Anything Lu had been about to yell died to a soft whisper.
“That wasn’t a ruse? You weren’t playing along to buy us time?” Her voice broke. “You truly know the Crown Prince of Argrid?”
Vex nodded. “Yes.”
A real response. Not a quip or a wink or a vulgar comeback.
“He called you Paxben,” Lu tried.
Vex came to with a piercing glare. “Paxben died six years ago.”
Six years ago. The revolution had been underway, so any news that did not directly involve the war hadn’t taken priority. But Lu remembered her parents and other leaders giving a moment of silence one morning—the king’s brother had led a cell of revolution sympathizers in Argrid, they’d said. Defensors had discovered his treachery and burned him, along with his son.
Lu hadn’t cared. Why should she mourn the death of an Argridian royal when she watched his people destroy her island every day?
“Rodrigu.” She said the name her parents had whispered.
Vex closed his eye, the name driving into him as though she’d screamed it.
“Your father,” she guessed.
Which made Vex the cousin of the Crown Prince of Argrid. The nephew of the king.
Vex had always found it fitting that he’d left Argrid on a ship. When he’d landed on Grace Loray and been shoved into one of the Church’s prisons, he’d felt as though the foundation of the earth had turned to water. Nothing was solid. Nothing was secure.
Until he’d gotten out of that hell and found his own future.
He wasn’t Paxben. He was Devereux Bell, notorious stream raider, wanted the island over. He hadn’t survived everything he’d been through only to be taken down by . . .
He remembered the look on Ben’s face. Shock. Hope.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Vex said, meeting Lu’s eyes with desperate certainty. “I’m not an Argridian spy or a Church plant. My uncle wanted me to be—that’s why he faked my death and dropped me on this island and waited to see whether I’d live or die. Well, I didn’t do either of those things. I became someone else.”
“You had to obey him, though”—Lu filled in the pieces—“because he poisoned you. He was looking for the cure too. Like you said—”
“I’m no more loyal to Elazar than you are to Milo Ibarra
,” Vex snapped. “That’s all. It doesn’t change a damn thing.”
Lu deflated. “It does, Devereux.”
Devereux. He relaxed.
“Does your crew know?” she asked.
He nodded. “It was how I met Edda. She was in the same godforsaken prison where Elazar dumped me in northern Grace Loray. We got out together.” His tension eased. “Nay didn’t care. She’s got her own painful history, as you’ve seen.”
Footsteps thumped down the stairs. Vex went rigid, his mind blanking, and he was more grateful than he could say when Lu angled in front of him. As though she might soften the force of whatever was coming.
A contingent stomped down the hall. The defensor who had raised the alarm led the way, and when they stopped, he hesitated as though he was reluctant to reveal his charge.
But Ben shoved him away. “Defensor Rayen, leave. Now. All of you. Get out.”
Each word was a dagger in proper Argridian, the heft and point of a man who would be obeyed. Vex was almost impressed. Last he’d seen Ben, he’d been a timid, obedient boy who’d have jumped into the ocean if Elazar had asked it of him.
The defensors filed out. Rayen bowed. “My prince,” he said, and stalked up the stairs.
Water hummed against the hull as Ben stepped up to the cell.
A tangle of nerves compelled Vex to get a handle on this situation. He moved around Lu, keeping his posture relaxed as he leaned one shoulder on the bars.
“Leadership agrees with you,” Vex said in Argridian.
Ben’s face went rigid. “Six years.”
Vex’s heart sank into his gut.
“I watched you burn.” Ben gripped the bars in tight, white knuckles. He didn’t pay any attention to Lu, his energy on Vex. “I made myself stand there until you were nothing but a charred corpse. And that’s all you say to me?”
“What should I say?” Vex hated that his voice broke. “Your father is a tyrant so blinded by religion that he had your uncle murdered and your cousin banished?”
Ben’s lips parted. Vex waited, expecting him to scream Heresy!
But he didn’t. He put his forehead to the bars, eyes closed. “He’s here.”
A long, slow drain tapped out Vex’s resolve.
The last thing he’d seen in Argrid had been his uncle, standing on the steps of Grace Neus Cathedral, moments before he’d had Rodrigu burned. Every time Argridian bullies showed up and threatened Vex, he’d done whatever they’d asked him, because all he could see when he closed his eye was Elazar. Standing under carvings of sins and Graces. Smiling.
A spasm swept over Vex, jarring him so hard his teeth rattled, but he covered it by raking his hand through his hair.
Ben felt the vibration along the bars and looked up.
“The defensors sent for him,” Ben continued. “He’s likely already climbing aboard.”
He walked away, padding back up the staircase.
Vex stiffened, as though every muscle was linked—again—to his cousin. His irmán.
They’d snuck into the kitchens in the middle of the night and eaten so many imported chocolates that they’d been sick for days. They’d climbed up as high as they could in the Grace Neus towers and dared each other to crawl out on the cupolas. It had devastated Vex to think Ben could be like Elazar, but Ben hadn’t come to see him after Vex had been arrested, or when he and Rodrigu were on trial, or when they waited in the carriage outside the cathedral’s jeering crowd.
“You can’t expect Ben to betray his father,” Rodrigu had told him. Vex had known the truth in that, because he was manacled in a carriage next to his own father, ready to die for him. But Elazar was wrong, no matter that he was Ben’s father. Ben had to see that. He would see it, and stop this, because they were irmáns and that mattered, too.
Vex slammed his eye shut now. Goddamn it, he would not give in to this. He didn’t have to feel the emotions from that past because it wasn’t Devereux Bell’s past—or so he’d been telling himself, every day, sometimes every minute, for six years.
Another shudder crept up Vex’s back, but he didn’t have the energy to hide this one.
Lu moved next to him. He looked at her and winced in realization.
“I should’ve . . . negotiated. They’ll kill us for trespassing on their ship.” Vex swallowed. “Especially now. If Elazar is here . . .”
Argrid had come to finish the war for Grace Loray. The worst of everything they’d feared was happening—
But Lu didn’t say anything. She fingered his shirtsleeve.
Vex’s heart faltered. “Lu, you don’t have to—”
She snaked her arms around him, her chin resting on his shoulder. Shock paralyzed him, but he regrouped, holding her as if she’d dissolve if he touched her too hard.
She stayed until he relaxed. Until they both did.
Ben kept his self-control even when he saw Jakes on the next level, waiting for him.
“What did you say to him?” Jakes asked. “Pious God help us, how is this possible?”
Ben wanted to scream. To shove Jakes away from standing so close to him.
But all he said was “Remember your place, Defensor.”
Jakes came to a halt, and Ben left, rushing for the middle deck.
He shoved his way into the laboratory. Gunnar’s cot was made despite the late hour, shadows flashing over it as he walked the length of the chain that hooked his ankle to the wall. Jakes’s doing, claiming that if Gunnar had repented, he must earn his freedom.
Though it made working with Gunnar like working alongside a leashed, feral wolf who could, if he one day chose, combust into flames.
Gunnar whirled when the door opened. The candle flame on the table heaved.
“What happened? There was shouting.” Gunnar’s hands clenched, relaxed, clenched again, seeking a weapon that his servant uniform didn’t have.
Ben ignored him, slammed the door, and stumbled forward. He caught himself on the table along the rear wall, and a vial of Alova Pipe fell over with a clank.
Paxben was alive. His cousin was alive.
Too much had been taken, too many foundations had given to sand, for Ben to trust this.
A vial smacked into the side of Ben’s head.
He shot a frown at Gunnar, who held another empty vial, poised to throw. His chain didn’t let him reach the whole room.
“What happened?” Gunnar asked with the inflection of a man trying to speak to an insect.
“Nothing that concerns you.”
“I am on this boat. It concerns me. We are attacking now?”
“No.”
Gunnar said a word in his language that Ben had heard him utter at least a dozen times before. He took it to mean asshole, idiot, or some combination of the two.
A knock on the door, and it opened, framing Jakes in the doorway. He spared Gunnar enough attention to see that his chain was fastened.
“Your father is waiting for you in the captain’s quarters,” Jakes said.
Ben crossed his arms, feigning indifference. “And Paxben?”
“Being brought up now.”
Ben nodded. “Tell my father I’ll be there soon.”
Jakes hesitated, clearly expecting to escort Ben, but after a long pause, he left.
“Benat,” Gunnar said when the door closed. With his heavy accent, it came out more as Ben-jay. “Do not leave me here without information!”
Ben got halfway to the door before he took pity on Gunnar.
“My cousin has risen from the dead,” he said, glad it sounded as unbelievable as it felt. “Which is miraculous, considering the Church burned him for heresy six years ago.”
“Heresy,” Gunnar parroted. “You can use him. How?”
“Use him? He was dead—I watched him die—”
Gunnar shrugged. “Church tried to kill him, and he survived. Either Church let him live or your father did. This could change things.”
Gunnar was right, damn him.
Ben had been lied to. He k
new that by now—but he’d assumed he’d uncovered the extent of the lies.
Elazar had staged the death. It was the only explanation that made sense, but gaping questions remained. Paxben had been caught in Rodrigu’s treason. He clearly held no loyalty to Elazar—unless Paxben’s defiance had been a ruse.
Ben needed to figure out where Paxben’s loyalties did lie before Elazar truly had him killed, or manipulated this event to benefit himself. But doing so meant plowing through the other emotions that crowded Ben’s chest like boulders in a valley after a landslide.
A vial rebounded off his sternum, this one hard enough to leave a bruise.
“Go,” Gunnar boomed. “I did not agree to wait here, letting the enemy win battles!”
Another vial, but this time, Ben caught it and whipped it back at Gunnar before he left.
Moments after his cousin had resurfaced, he was planning how best to use him.
Paxben was right. Leadership did agree with him.
31
THE MAIN DECK was alive with defensors, those from the Astuto as well as a dozen more from the Desapiadado, the first sign that Elazar was aboard. Most sent Ben sharp salutes and calls of “Prince Benat” in cracking tones.
Elazar wanted to know he was approaching.
The captain’s cabin was under the quarterdeck, a spacious chamber with tables for charting and mahogany shelves of nautical equipment. Thick carpets and padded chairs made the room comfortable, elevated by gold trimmings and a replica of Argrid’s symbol in polished wood on the back wall. Ben had spent little time here, entrusting the voyage to the man Elazar had selected as the Astuto’s captain, so it didn’t feel as intrusive as it might have seeing Elazar take over the finest room on the boat.
Jakes stood at attention by one of the large windows shuttered to hide the lights within the room. The rest of the defensors here were from Elazar’s own guard. Elazar himself sat behind the desk under the decorative crest of Argrid, speaking with another defensor.
The door behind Ben closed. Elazar looked up.
Ben spoke first. “I thought we were working together now.”
Apparently, he was going with anger as his guiding emotion. Harder to play off, but he was barely hanging on to composure enough to be angry, not sobbing.