“Thank you…my apologies…my…thanks…” He had no idea what he meant to say. But the hit had blown the dust off an old thought, one he hadn’t dared to court in years.
Kill the old man and be free.
Of vows. Of guilt. Of this unbearable heaviness anchoring his heart to his guts—No. He’d sold his soul, but he wasn’t about to damn it.
He held his hands to his face, trying to smother the bellow that tore out of him. The gold ring pressed a hot kiss to his cheek. Nicholas tried to yank it off again, with no luck.
He needed to find Etta, he wanted to find Etta, there was only Etta—
“Forget what the old bat said,” Sophia said fiercely, her voice ringing like steel. “She doesn’t have a hold on you. She only wants you to think she does. Show her you’re above it! Show her you aren’t afraid, damn it!”
“Are you saying that because you believe it,” he asked bitterly, “or because you need Ironwood alive, so you can bring the astrolabe back to him?”
Sophia recoiled. It had been some time since he was on the receiving end of her murderous glare, and he was almost comforted by its familiarity. “You think I won’t gut that man the first chance I get?”
“I think you’re in this for your own ends,” he told her. “I think a rather large part of you, the very same part that prevented you for years from lowering yourself into even conversation with me, loves seeing me bested by circumstances.”
“Of course I’m in it to serve myself, you fool, and so are you!” she hissed. “We’ve derailed our search for the one thing that matters to find someone who ultimately really doesn’t. But if you think I’d go back to the same family that wanted me just about as much as they wanted you, then you need to pull your head out of your ass before I do it for you!”
Orphanage. Pickpocketing. The past she’d kept hidden beneath the layers of silk and lace. She had worked hard to polish herself into something shining, gleaming, and what had it gotten her? Not the heir, or even being named it once the heir was gone.
As if he would ever let either of us truly forget our origins, he thought with a pang.
Anger, however, was easier to live inside than unwelcome sympathy. “Isn’t that why you kept that blade hidden? Because you intended to use it?”
Her eyebrows flew up. “Is that what this is about? Yes, I picked that blade up when we were in Nassau. I might have told you about it, except I knew you wouldn’t believe I hadn’t had it on me the entire time. I just wanted to be able to study it without you snatching it away like I’m a child.”
“You should have told me,” he insisted.
“Because you’ve shown me so much trust? You’ve listened to me so well, such as ten bloody minutes ago, when I told you not to take that deal?” she said, throwing a finger in his face. “But you did take it, and now we have to live with it. So stop making that pitiful face and buck up. We’ll go to Carthage, all right? Ironwood sends out notices about major changes to the timeline to all of the guardians and travelers posted throughout the centuries. By the time we arrive, the two Jacarandas will likely have the answer we need, or they can point us to someone who can tell us. Rose Linden can go take a long walk off a cliff and drag the Belladonna to hell with her!”
She’d mauled him with the truth—he had not, in fact, trusted her. Not even for a moment, because he’d been so certain she hadn’t given him a reason to. They could not continue this way, but they could not seem to break out of this cycle of loathing, either.
“She said it’d be useless to talk to the Jacarandas—”
“And you believe her? After the trick she pulled?” Sophia pressed. “She told us all that nonsense about the Thorns to get us to trust her enough not to question the terms of the deal. Forget her. I’d rather travel to Carthage on a chance than believe her ever again.”
She was right. If nothing else, they needed to leave this infernal place. Nicholas straightened, cracking his knuckles at his side to try to release the pressure that seemed ready to shoot from his hands.
This is shameful. I’m falling apart like a boy during his first boarding. Pull yourself together, man.
Nicholas passed through the alchemy workshop at a near run, and took the stairs two at a time. Sophia kept pace with him, plundering the depths of her extensive knowledge of profanities as she misjudged the distance of a step and fell forward, catching herself on her hands. She sprang up the last few steps, nearly spitting on Nicholas’s offered hand. “I don’t need your bloody help!”
“Then you won’t have it,” he shot back.
The golden-haired boy didn’t look up from his book as they passed. With a chill that sank into his bones, Nicholas realized the woman was behind the counter again, the bloodred candle glowing beside her.
“Come again, your business is appreciated!” she sang out.
He and Sophia made matching rude gestures.
“Tell your mistress I’m coming back to skin that overgrown dog of hers,” Sophia said to the boy, “and turn it into my next coat!”
He looked up, pale eyes shining with tears at the mere thought. “Selene?”
“All right, no, I won’t,” Sophia called back. “But tell her I said it!”
Nicholas chased his anger as he left the store, trying to master it before it mastered him. Rain rushed down the back of his neck, soaking him through in moments. He would have welcomed a bitter wind, anything to cool the monster of grief sweltering inside of him. Instead, the heat that started in his right hand, the ring finger, seemed to throb like a second heartbeat in his body. When he finally looked up, the city was lost to the fog, disappearing like the beautiful dream it was.
“Which way?” he asked Sophia. “How do we get to Carthage?”
“Follow me,” she said, turning north.
And with no other choice obvious to him, he did.
RATHER THAN WASTE WEEKS TRAVELING BY SEA, Sophia charted a journey for them across the years and continents that involved a considerable amount of danger, but—blessedly—less vomit from her seasickness.
First, a journey back, yet again, to the swamps of Florida, and several hours of navigating murky waters and wasting coins to bribe the pitiful guardian punished with watching the passage there. That deposited them in Portugal, in what Sophia claimed was the thirteenth century. From there, they walked to yet another passage, this one leading to Germany in the tenth, and finally, after stealing a pair of horses and nearly bringing the wrath of a whole village down upon them, they found themselves in 1700, this time in Tarragona, in the region of Catalonia.
Of course, as seemed to be their lot, Nicholas and Sophia spent hours following the shoddy dirt roads on foot in the hope that her memory would serve them better than his own judgment. To pass the time, he tried to muster up what details he could about Carthage after years of the memories collecting dust. Perhaps the facts that remained would offer some protection against what might lie ahead.
Much of said knowledge had come from Hall, whose retention of maritime history remained relatively sharp, if slightly rusted by age and exposure to too much sun. The ancient city of Carthage, once Rome’s great rival, lay in a supreme position on the northeast coast of Africa, with sea inlets to the north and south. Its immense wealth, without the flash of Rome’s opulence, was owed to the fact that all ships passing in and out of the Mediterranean sailed through the gap between it and Sicily.
There had been three separate Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage; the one Hall recalled best, the second, had produced Hannibal, who had been a great favorite of Chase and Nicholas during the captain’s post-supper tales. The ingenious general had sailed with an army of nearly a hundred thousand men and dozens of elephants, and together they’d torn open Spain and marched through the Alps to Italy. As boys, he and Chase had even attempted to re-create the crossing of the Rhône River by Hannibal’s army, using discarded siding from Hall’s ship as rafts, and rats in the place of elephants.
He tried to take some refuge in th
ose lantern-lit memories, but the longer they walked, the easier it became to slip inside his darker thoughts and dwell there. Save for a few hares, they’d yet to encounter another living soul; while he’d taken careful count of the weapons Sophia had strapped to her body, he could no longer be sure there wasn’t yet another knife hidden somewhere on her person—or that she wouldn’t use it to strand him here and continue on without him. Or worse.
She cannot kill me without the nearby passage closing, he thought. How comforting.
The deception from the Belladonna had rattled him, but now he found himself regretting how easily he had trusted Sophia when she’d argued in favor of traveling to Carthage; he’d followed her to this spot, which might not lead them to Carthage at all, but a grisly death or yet another ruse.
Nicholas’s hands curled into fists at his sides, bunching the already-tight muscles of his shoulders. He was useless as a traveler. Why couldn’t he have pushed harder to learn the locations of the passages? Why did he have to place his trust back in an Ironwood, especially one who hated him with a force that could grind whole mountains to dust?
He was an able seaman, skilled in his trade, but here, he might as well have been one of those rats clinging to a poorly made raft.
“Who are these travelers?” he asked. “You said they were Jacarandas, and that they were being punished by the old man for something?”
“Remus and Fitzhugh Jacaranda,” Sophia said. “They were both close friends of Ironwood’s for decades, some of his most trusted advisors. Julian said the day he discovered they had defected to the Thorns, he went into such a rage that he burned all of their belongings, landholdings, and records. When they realized the Thorns weren’t all they were cracked up to be, they tried to come crawling back to ask for forgiveness. Rather than kill them, he sent them to Carthage during the Roman siege as punishment to prove their loyalty. They’re assigned to watch the passages there.”
Roman siege. The Third Punic War, then.
“I’m sure it gave them plenty of time to consider their crimes,” Nicholas said. “I can’t imagine this is, or ever was, a popular destination for travel. What is there to observe?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The guardians and travelers assigned to watch passages aren’t just there to track comings and goings in and out of them,” Sophia said, to his surprise. “They ensure the passages remain stable and aren’t in danger of collapsing.”
Nicholas nodded. Julian had told him a passage became unstable—or collapsed—under two circumstances: with the death of a nearby traveler who was outside of their natural time, or, Ironwood believed, simply from overuse and age. As if they became worn-out and flimsy, like old fabric that had been turned too many times.
“More passages than ever have been collapsing and closing altogether,” Sophia said, her profile outlined by the rough sea below. “That’s why I believed him, you know. That he wanted the astrolabe to examine newly discovered passages, for their destinations and stability. I’m not gullible. I didn’t believe everything he told me, and I didn’t want everything he wanted.”
Once the words were out, he saw her shoulders slump, as if relieved of the weight of them. He recalled his accusation in Prague, and wondered at how long she had let her temper simmer without exploding.
I know, he wanted to say. No one who believed Ironwood so fully would have survived this long.
He tried to picture her then, in her native time, in that orphanage. Small, filthy, and hungry enough to risk being caught stealing. That, at least, he understood. A child faced with the raw desperation of survival had it imprinted on their soul. They were never able to shake the sense that one day, everything good in their life might again vanish—not fully.
“Maybe that’s the real reason he never made me heir.” Her mouth twisted in a cruel little smile.
“He didn’t make you heir because you’re a woman and he’s a bloody fool,” Nicholas said. “And because there was Julian, in all of his shining glory.”
Sophia glanced up, brows raised ever so slightly as she let out a tsk. “Speaking ill of the dead now, Carter?”
“He didn’t—” Nicholas caught the word before it could escape.
“He didn’t what?”
Damn it all.
He hadn’t told her yet about the conversation he’d had with Rose about Julian likely surviving…not because she didn’t deserve to know, but because Nicholas couldn’t tell how she might react. While it might improve her view of him, it might just as easily throw off the uneasy balance between them they’d managed to obtain. No need to rock a boat already struggling in stormy waters.
Sophia seemed to be careening from unpredictable highs to surly lows, her moods like errant breezes, and he needed her steady and focused on finding Etta, not changing her mind and disappearing to search out Julian—it was callous of him, he knew this, and hideously selfish. It took him buffeting his heart with years of memories of her vile insults and cutting dismissals before the notion sat well with him.
The end here justified the deceitful means. He could lie, if Etta was there to later absolve him of the guilt of it. There could be no side trips to find Julian or learn where he might have been all of these years, or even what might have become of him in the meantime. If he knew his half brother at all, he had commandeered some palatial island retreat to hide away in. Julian always landed right side up.
“‘Shining glory,’” she muttered. “How can you not see it? He never liked Julian. Hated everything Julian loved. Gambling and drinking and painting. Wasn’t shy about telling him how worthless he was on any given day. He was a resounding disappointment, no matter what he did.”
Nicholas’s brow furrowed. He’d known the old man hadn’t outwardly mourned the “loss” of his heir, but he’d assumed that was because any sign of weakness, any crack in his veneer, would have been taken as an invitation to his enemies to try and seize his throne. That, and his heart had calcified long ago. “Was it truly as bad as all that?”
“Worse, probably. Ironwood was ashamed and plagued by him. He was convinced Julian would ruin his empire. If Julian hadn’t died…”
“What?”
“He probably would have done it himself,” she finished slowly, eyes forward.
“And yet, you didn’t believe us when we told you in Palmyra he desired new heirs,” Nicholas said coolly.
For once, Sophia had no response to that.
“Was he a disappointment to you?” he countered. He’d always wondered about this: Julian chased every skirt he saw, knowing Sophia was at home, waiting for their wedding day. He’d spoken of his intended with a kind of affection that, having met and known Etta, Nicholas saw now wasn’t the sweet fire of love so much as the cool balm of friendship. But Sophia had mourned him—genuinely mourned, with all the black crepe and seclusion it required.
“His death was the disappointment,” she said. “You letting him fall off the side of a mountain was a disappointment.”
“So now you believe it was an accident after all?” Nicholas challenged. “I didn’t push him?”
She cast him a pitying look that made his soul heat and itch. “I can see now that you don’t have what it takes to pull off a murder. There’s no iron in you. If you had done it, you’d still be on that mountain, weeping about it.”
Nicholas opened his mouth and barely caught the words. I’m more Ironwood than you are.
An icy current swept through his blood, and he let out a low, bitter laugh at himself. Did he really have so much pride that he’d use his hated heritage to argue that he wasn’t as soft as she believed?
“He was my best friend,” she said. “My only friend. I’m not going to apologize for being furious with you for what happened, because his life mattered to me. But…it wasn’t what you had with Linden. If I’d had a choice, if there’d been any other way to get a modicum of respect in that family, I wouldn’t have…”
“Become betrothed to Julian?” he finished.
??
?Nor any man.” Her eye bored into him in the beat of silence that followed, daring him to say something about it. “I have always preferred the company of women, regardless of history’s views of it. The rare exception being your idiot beloved, who can eat rocks and choke for all I care.”
Nicholas, as it stood, did not have an opinion or prejudice about any of this, other than to think the feeling she’d described was likely mutual on Etta’s part.
“Have a care,” he said, with a light warning in his voice. “My beloved is not by any means an idiot, but she has been known to have a rather vicious backhand.”
“I’m not…I’m not without a heart,” he heard Sophia say, her chin raised, eyes straight ahead. “I’m not. I just don’t have the luxury of being soft. I am trying to survive.”
The same as you, his mind finished for her. Life had offered them both poison—different, bitter variations of it, but poison all the same. He reached up, rubbing a hand over the curve of his scalp.
“You don’t have to trust me,” she told him, eyes shifting away. “Just trust my anger. I would rather die than let that old man have everything he wants. He needs to know what it feels like to want something forever out of his reach.”
Nicholas nodded. He could manage that much. She’d made excuses about needing his help to disappear once the astrolabe was found in their initial bargain, but he had a far easier time trusting revenge as her motivation. But there was something about the way she held herself, tugging at her ear, that made him wonder what was being left unsaid.
Sophia walked faster, moving ahead of him on the path, dodging his questioning look entirely.
Their destination rose into view on the cliffside. The crumbling remains of the Roman amphitheater, stacks of stone slabs left to manage the weather and world the best they could, looked ghostly under the bone-white touch of the moon. Beyond them was the sea, its endless glistening, thrashing darkness. He wondered, given the strategic position, if the Romans had held this land to watch for, and ward off, the Carthaginians in ancient times.