Evan stared down at the crowd of upturned faces, his head a jumble of questions, his heart bruised by lies and betrayal. A stormcaster, was he? He’d give them a storm, then.
Before, Evan had reached for air. This time, he reached for water. He dug a canyon beneath the Siren, building a wall of water between them as she sank out of sight. And then he let it go.
He hadn’t anticipated the backwash. Cloud Spirit bucked and rolled, and he lost his grip on the rigging and fell, screaming, into the sea.
3POLITICS IN PORT
Evan leaned against the bollard, watching as the last of the cargo was unloaded from the New Moon and transferred to the dockside warehouse.
New Moon was a sturdy, low-slung, single-masted craft built for the coastal trade—one that Evan could pilot with one foot, in his sleep. Each little realm along the coast had its tariffs and fees—costs that could be avoided by a pilot who knew these waters intimately. Evan did.
It had been two years since he’d fallen into the sea off Tarvos. Two years he’d spent schooling himself while crewing for others.
Kadar, the dock boss, strolled over, his thumbs tucked under his purple suspenders. “A good run, Faris,” he said, pulling out his pocket watch as if it counted days as well as hours. “You must’ve had the Breaker on your heels.”
“The wind was with us several days running,” Evan said. Fair winds and following seas—the life of a stormlord mage.
“Must be why they call you Lucky,” Kadar said. His broad smile exposed the gold slides on his teeth.
“Lucky Faris” was the public name Evan had used since he’d left Cloud Spirit. It was a kind of personal joke. Not very funny.
Evan had little memory of how he made it to shore after his long fall from Cloud Spirit’s foremast. It was lucky he’d hit the water instead of the deck. Lucky that they were close to shore when it happened. Lucky he’d been a strong swimmer for as long as he could remember.
No. Lucky would be if none of this had happened. He wasn’t lucky, but he was a survivor, and so somehow he kept swimming, finding a place where the high cliffs gave way to a rocky beach. From there he’d continued south, following the coast back to Endru, where Captain Strangward had plucked him from the streets. He knew that neither Strangward nor the empress was likely to come there. The harbor wasn’t deep enough to handle blue-water ships.
Evan had spent a year hiding in Endru, working odd jobs in the port, piloting shallow-draft vessels when he could get that work, struggling between the need to stay dead and the desire to find out his history. Dead was easy. Dead was safe. But it wasn’t enough.
The empress had said that he carried Nazari blood. That should make him a princeling. Instead, it seemed to have made him a target. There weren’t many bloodsworn this far south, but now and then he’d see them in the taverns on the waterfront. Were they looking for him? Or had the empress moved on, assuming he was dead?
A year ago, he’d risked returning to Tarvos, to find better work and the answers he’d craved. He’d been worried that someone might recognize him, but that wasn’t a problem. The compound where he’d lived was gone, replaced by dockside warehouses.
Kadar and his crew had muscled into the port right after the empress destroyed it. He’d bought up all the prime real estate, rebuilt some of it, and gotten his fingers into all the local commerce. No deal was done, no crew was hired, no money came and went through the port without Kadar getting a piece of it.
In Tarvos, people said that Captain Strangward was dead and Cloud Spirit sailed for the empress now, with Tully Samara at the helm.
Evan’s heart twisted when he heard this. Strangward had been a tough master, but Evan had trusted the bond between them—the unspoken promise of honesty. He’d trusted the crew of Cloud Spirit—Brody and the others—and they had betrayed him. He was done with that. He would not give his trust again so readily. The problem was that not even a stormcaster could sail a blue-water ship on his own.
During his year in Tarvos, Evan had been given a few contracts to crew on blue-water ships, but Kadar mainly assigned him to New Moon, the one ship the dock boss owned outright. Kadar had learned that with Lucky Faris aboard, cargoes got delivered and goods got smuggled in record time, which put more money in the dock boss’s pocket.
Evan still had the share that Strangward had given him. Since arriving in Tarvos, he’d taken all the work he could get, but at this rate, given Kadar’s stingy wages, he would be old and gray before he built a stake large enough to buy the kind of ship he wanted.
There was also his addiction to books.
“The packages you brought ashore for me?” Evan said. “Where are they?”
Kadar tipped his head toward the warehouse. “They’re just inside the door.”
“Thank you.” Evan turned back toward the warehouse, but Kadar dropped a hand on his shoulder.
“Look, Faris. I’m having a little gathering at the Windfall later on. I hope you’ll join us.”
Kadar owned the Windfall—a combined tavern/clicket-house/company store for sailors. He liked to run a tab for his crews so that he could part them from their pay before they found somewhere else to spend it.
“Lucky Faris” might sound like a name a gambler would use, but Evan had no intention of leaving his earnings on the tables at the Windfall, or getting deep in his cups and deeper in debt and spilling secrets that were better kept close.
Kadar owned everything in Tarvos worth having, but he didn’t own Evan—not yet—and that grieved the dock boss.
“Thank you,” Evan said, “but I need
