The cirrocumulus had always been Azrael’s favourite clouds.
Back when she was little, she used to call them ripple clouds, and she’d lay on the rooftop terrace of the Academy, looking up at the sky through the eyeholes on her mask, and imagine the world turning upside-down so she could fall face-first on them. Now, sailing the skies far above the Isles, she still couldn’t name a thing she’d rather wake up to.
The clouds hugged the ship gently, soft and spreading as far as the eye could see. She hovered low over them, hanging off the side of the ship with brush in hand, and inhaled the crisp air of the heights as the wind tugged at her clothes. This, she thought, is worth waking up before half the crew had even fallen asleep.
Sounds from the deck pulled her from her thoughts, and she focused on repainting again. At the altitudes The Dancer sailed, even top quality silentwood from Caer could dry and split during long journeys, without a careful hand and a good brush of Isdian oil to cover it. Azrael finished it with an elegant stroke over the ship’s name, and pulled herself up to the deck.
“…Will meet them right on schedule,” Ranye told someone, and turned just in time to almost bump into Azrael. “Executor’s ass! How long’ve you been standing here?”
“I just got back up,” Azrael said with a chuckle, holding up the brush.
“You’re already done?” The bos’n’s voice was just short of impressed. “You genuinely enjoy waking before the sun and hanging off a rope every other day, don’t you?”
“It gets me off the deck,” Azrael said with a shrug, “and on a good day, allows me to touch the clouds. What’s not to enjoy?”
Bos’n Ranye laughed.
“Yours till the rest of your life, then,” she said, and dropped one gloved hand on Azrael’s shoulder. “Now. We’re meeting Sunrise Prophet by the Lighthouse in give-or-take an hour. Quartermaster said he expects all hands on deck — to quote, shining like the Council’s silver, if you don’t want to fly off board — but I’m going to give you a job in my quarters instead.”
Azrael felt the smile melt off her face. Ranye was keeping her away from another ship — that meant the ship was a Varien, most likely on its way to the Capital. Chances of any of its crew recognising Azrael were next to nonexistent, but she preferred the security that came with making that deal with the bos’n.
“What will I be doing in your quarters?” She asked.
“I spilled my tea over some notes,” Ranye admitted quietly. “You’ll rewrite them for me, nice and neat, in nothing-ever-happened technique.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Azrael turned towards the other woman. “How long are you expecting the meeting with the Prophet to take?”
Ranye wiggled her eyebrows. “Now, that is the interesting part.” She lowered her voice yet, guiding Azrael towards the bos’n’s quarters as if Azrael wouldn’t have found her way otherwise. “Not too long. We’re picking up some cargo from them— for the Palace.”
Azrael stopped short.
“Palace,” she managed, “Palace of Justice?”
“Palace of Dumb Questions.” Ranye opened the door and strode in first. She picked up a still-wet notebook from the desk. “Here’s your patient.” She pushed it into Azrael’s hands. “Yes, Palace of Justice. What got you so worried? You never leave the ship either way.”
Azrael recovered with a weak smile. “Heard a lot about it, is all.”
“Varien kids,” Ranye muttered on her way out. “Scared by masks and locked doors; good thing we don’t have more of you onboard.” She pointed towards the ink and quill on the desk, waiting for Azrael to nod. “You’re not a practitioner, and you aren’t associated with one, so stop worrying about the Palace and worry about copying that mess.”
The bos’n left her alone with that, but it took Azrael some time before she convinced herself to follow Ranye’s advice. The other woman was right; Azrael never left the ship as they docked. Even if the crew of the Prophet for some reason asked them to take that cargo directly to the Palace, she’d be allowed to stay onboard and wait for the rest of them to return. And still…
She shook her head. She wouldn’t think about the Palace — she’d promised herself that a long time ago. No one aboard The Dancer knew of her reasons for avoiding Varien ships, and it was better left so, even if it sometimes meant playing a superstitious child.
~
Azrael stayed focused on her task for the next hour. She deciphered Ranye’s smudged notes slowly, and it took her several practice pages to get used to the bos’n’s handwriting. According to the slant of her ’T’s and ‘L’s, Ranye held the quill completely differently from Azrael, and had a habit of letting the ink almost completely leave its tip before tapping into the ink bottle again.
Voices on the other side of the door startled her. She hadn’t even noticed when they’d arrived to the Lighthouse.
“I assure you, sir, the boatswain’s quarters will be more than comfortable.” The Quartermaster’s voice. Azrael got up and stalked towards a corner as the door slammed open.
“Comfort is of little relevance,” a masked man replied as he entered the room.
Azrael’s stomach muscles tightened, painfully and involuntarily, and a quick breath left her lips. The man turned to her, eyes cold behind the grey-green mask.
“Who are you?” He asked. She stared at his boots, cursing herself for having been stupid enough to look at his face before. What was she thinking? It could’ve been Erlick or Myres under that mask — or worse, it could’ve been Reiner, and she could’ve already been as good as dead.
“Rosie,” Ranye answered from the door, and gestured for Azrael to come closer. Azrael complied mechanically. “She’s my cabin girl.”
The masked man gave a small shrug and turned to look around the room again.
“This will do,” he decided. “Bring in the cargo.”
Azrael and Ranye stepped aside as two other men walked in — neither of them masked, but with expressions just as unreadable — carrying a cage between them. Azrael caught glimpse of a girl inside, her hands chained by the wrists and her eyes and mouth tied with dark cloth.
A heretic. The word flew through Azrael’s mind in Reiner’s voice, as if she was being debriefed. They’d brought a practitioner onboard, and with her the men who had hunted her down. This wasn’t a delivery for the Palace: it was a journey to execution.
*
The masked man’s name was Captain Arcus Vane, and he was to command The Dancer until they reached the Capital. Azrael was told as much by Ranye, in between of the bos’n raging over the specific details of the arrangement.
“Capt’n and Qartermaster just replaced, can you believe it? The snot took our ship like a bloody pirate— he’ll give it back, he says. Who does he think he is?”
But she never said a word of it when she knew he could hear her.
It would take them two weeks to reach the Capitol. Azrael spent the first couple of days swinging sleeplessly in her sleeping net below deck, her entire body tingling whenever she’d think about the masked man pacing in the captain’s quarters above, and for the first time in years she wasn’t looking forward to oiling the ship every other dawn.
Everything about Captain Vane, as reasonably polite as he was in his interactions with the crew, made Azrael consider testing her luck by jumping off board.
He was a Captor. An employee of the Palace, a graduate from the Academy. He was like Father, like Reiner— and, almost, like Azrael herself. She couldn’t tell which of those thoughts scared her the most. She did her best to stay out of his way, doing her little jobs and keeping to the corners, but nonetheless she caught bits and pieces of Vane’s conversations with the crew members he’d brought along from Sunrise Prophet.
Their ship was badly damaged, shortly before they’d met with The Dancer. Azrael heard them discuss the details of how it happened, but other than mentions of the heretic and the Palace, she couldn’t understand a word. It didn’t surprise her; the Captors, especially those who took jobs working with the same group for a longer period of time, always developed their own set of codes and signals to be used during missions. Azrael vividly remembered the lessons that demonstrated when and why such methods could be important.
Ranye, on the other hand, apparently didn’t need to understand them to know where the real problem lay.
“They aren’t giving our ship back.”
They — Ranye, Azrael, the captain and the quartermaster, and a handful of others — sat around the table in the kitchen, most of them clinging to their mugs of warm sweetened wine, a week into their journey to the Capitol. They had entered the Varien skies the day before, even though the Isles were still only smudges in the distance, and already the temperatures were lower and the winds harsher.
Missy, the stick-thin cabin boy, pulled a blanket over his shoulders. “What do you mean, aren’t giving our ship back?”
“I mean, they stole her,” Ranye said. “The Prophet got destroyed, they lost ‘er, and so they took The Dancer instead. I’m sure, we’ll be gone the moment we set foot on land, one way or another, and they’ll sail our Dancer off into the sunset. And why’d they want to give her back?” She patted the wall next to her head. “A damn fine ship.”
Missy’s eyes went wide. “So, will we steal her back?”
Everyone turned to look at him. Azrael let her gaze wander between the other faces: the captain and the quartermaster, both strong-built men with greying beards; bos’n Ranye, eyes sparkling with passion; Missy with his blanket and a carefully expectant smile on his face; the cook; the doctor; the navigator… none of them looked like they were about to object.
“We can’t just raise a mutiny,” Azrael said. Everyone’s attention shifted to her.
“Why not?” Missy asked darkly.
“Because—“ Azrael turned to Ranye for support, but the bos’n just raised an eyebrow. Azrael sighed. “Because they’re from the Palace of Justice. Because we’re in Varien skies, and as such subject to Varien law. Because they caught a practitioner and brought her onboard, and they’re not just going to lay down and surrender if we ask nicely. Should I go on?”
“No one said anything about asking nicely,” Quartermaster murmured, and a few of the others nodded.
“Rosie,” Ranye said, putting her hand over Azrael’s. “It’s alright, we’re all scared. But The Dancer is our home. We have to try and get her back. She belongs to us.”
The captain raised his mug. “Laws of the skies before laws of the land.”
“We can’t let fear of some practitioner stop us,” Missy added. “We’ll push her off if we have to.”
Azrael opened and closed her mouth, looking from one of them to the other, searching for words that could convince them. But if they weren’t about to listen to what she’d already said — and that much, at least, was obvious — what else could she possibly say?
I grew up at the Palace’s Academy. My entire back is still scarred from a punishment I received when I was thirteen. I know what I’m talking about.
They wouldn’t believe her. To them, even though the Palace’s reach was far and well-known, the stories about how Captors were made were barely more than legends. They wouldn’t believe her if she told them what really happened there — and if they would, then they’d never believe her that she had managed to escape it.
So she conceded and nodded, and they all cheered to their suicide in the making. They sat there nearly all night, a new strength in their voices, and more than once repeated what Missy had said about not fearing the practitioner.
But Azrael didn’t fear the practitioner.
She feared the man with cold eyes and a mask on his face who had killed and tortured his way through the Academy; the man who brought her nightmares filled with unwanted memories, and who bowed to the Council of the Palace of Justice.
*
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