Chương 60: 2.7. Darkness

Annalise sat up from the center of the cloth and rubbed her midsection.

"That's done it," she said.

"How's my arm?"

"Eh." Tiago yawned and rolled his sleeve down. Every al Ydris, Seth had learned, had the same tattoo across their forearm—a curling vine design that completed their blood-magic healing circle when laid upon the gap in the linework.

"It'll be a scar for sure."

"Fine, Tiago," Ofelia snapped, from the blood-flecked washbasin." Fine. You dig out the bullet next time and I'll be the one watching and needling the whole time."

"Let's make il Gutierre do it next time," Tiago said.

"Make up for sleeping on the job." Seth sat halfway up from his repose in the carriage's satin-lined interior.

"Are you all ignoring how I saved Annalise from Red Corbin, scourge of wherever-it-was?" Annalise glared at him.

"We're not ignoring it. We're allowing you to walk around without bells tied to your neck like a bleeding sheep."

"That would be terribly funny." Ofelia wiped a terrycloth across her forceps.

"Now that you've brought it up, I'm in favor."

"Scourge of the Kanjiri skyways," Tiago said." I'd heard of him. A genuine menace. Had you not?" Seth shared a head-shake with the al Ydris ladies.

"You didn't miss much," Ofelia said.

"No confetti out of the stump, or anything. Unless you'd've asked him to sign your saber."

"I might have," Tiago said.

"You're reading the wrong books." He stifled another yawn.

"Wish I could've met him, at least."

"Here's what I don't get about pirates." Annalise prodded at her scar.

"You're a man of justice, Sunshine. No tears shed on the scaffold."

"Sure."

"But everyone goes away with the fairies when it's pirates," she said.

"Even you."

"To a point," Tiago said.

"I still would've killed him. Just let him do a monologue or two first."

"We did," Seth said.

"Piracy is a fanciful crime," Ofelia mused.

"Sky piracy doubly so. You say murder or assault, and your listener rightly frowns. But say piracy and you put stars in eyes. Who among us can't relate to the urge to light out with a crew of vagabonds, quomodocunquizing across the United Territories in a baldrick and a ruffled shirt?"

"That's not a word," Tiago said.

"Shirt?"

"The quo- thing."

"That's absolutely a word," Ofelia said.

"When one hears of a pirate, one imagines living the life of the perpetrator, and not the victim. But the latter outnumber the former, always. And you die just the same at the hands of a rakish avatar of freedom as you do in the maw of a seraph. It's the sense of belonging, I suppose. To an iconoclastic community."

"Belonging." Seth picked a blade of grass into pieces as he thought.

"What if it's belonging?" Tiago lifted a brow.

"What if what's belonging?"

"When I used my Darkness up there," Seth said.

"One of them saw me and I… I told him he didn't, I guess? Or that I was just minding my own business. And what you told me. About how a Darkness works. It's what you long for. And I thought: what if my Darkness ends up being, I dunno. Summoning an image of Annalise's butt." Tiago scoffed. Annalise tried to turn her laugh into some kind of irritated exhalation, but he'd gotten her with that one.

"And then after today, I thought, what if it's tweaking the noses of the powerful? Or being a perfect liar? But that's not what that was, I don't think. It didn't feel like I was lying, it felt like… like I was making it true." He let the torn-up grass sprinkle to the ground.

"I guess—if I really thought about it—I've always wanted to feel like I belong. To exist someplace, without being told to clear out or explain myself or whatever. To be accepted, I guess. Does that make any sense at all? Would it be ridiculous if my Darkness is belonging somewhere super-hard? Hard enough to fool people?" Annalise stared at him in astonished silence. Tiago cleared his throat.

"Uh, yeah. That'd make some sense, I guess."

"I hope you don't take this as emasculating," Ofelia said.

"But that's the most adorable thing I've ever heard."

"We'll need to verify that," Tiago said.

"We'll work out some testing. And maybe build up your endurance. First time always knocks you on your ass, but you'll get used to it."

"Aye, well." Annalise started as though shook awake, and clambered off the circle cloth.

"That's for later. Need you and your sister to head down the hill to ol' Sheepfuck. Someone has to go tell the Corregidor—the Karla, whatever—we found our man and more besides." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"What about the stormship?" Tiago asked, helping his mother to fold the magic circle lengthwise.

"Ship'll keep." Annalise ruffled her son's hair.

"Don't you worry, Sunshine. I won't sink it without ya." Tiago tapped his temple in salute and belted his saber to his hip. Seth rose from the carriage step, and faltered as a broad-shouldered shadow fell across him.

"Not you, il Gutierre." Annalise's voice was low and quiet, like thunder rolling in across a Plainland valley.

"You're sticking out here with me."

"I should've waited," he said.

"Or stayed out of the way. I know. I'm sorry." She frowned down the ramp of her nose at him.

"Sorry won't cut it, young man." He met her darkened eyes, made even darker by the heavy painted lids that hooded them.

"What will?" Seth lay limp against the Verdugo's stomach, wrung-out and drooling. His breath billowed like a ragged surrender flag. His chest shone with sweat. His pulse throbbed in his ears. His legs, he wasn't sure. He couldn't feel them. His vision was full of soft whiteness, owing to his face's smothered position in the soft space between a pair of warm, round, pillows. They swelled beneath his sweating brow and then relaxed again as their owner plucked the pipe from her mouth.

She exhaled a cloud of smoke up to the apex of the tent.

"This Shipfarrok stuff is smooth," Annalise said. Her ankles were hooked behind his calves, trapping him in a soft squeeze between her two thick thighs. His mind sorted through the smithereens into which the Verdugo had fucked it, seeking a reply. It furnished "Whuhh."

"Doesn't taste like much, though. Hay, mostly." Seth shifted atop his lover, reaching with one limp arm to the blankets beneath them in a bid to prop himself up.

"Ah-ah." Her ankles rose to lock in place behind his ass, holding him fast.

"Sian aig sabhail, mie'Lynnokien." He got enough air into his lungs to ask, "Whazzat mean?"

"Means you're staying put, boy." She flexed her abdomen; he gasped at the silky pull inside her.

"Till I know you're good and remorseful."

"Ohh. Okay." He nuzzled further into her sweat-slick chest.

"I'll be sorry any second now." She kissed his forehead. Her breath smelled like cedar smoke.

"Good boy."

"I am sorry," he murmured.

"Really I am."

"I know you are," she said.

"And I know you'll obey my orders from now on."

"I will." The gap in her front teeth showed in her smile.

"Then you're forgiven, pet. No harm done."

"I got you a bit shot."

"Nah."

"I threw off your game."

"You remember that barn dance I did with the syndicate lads? Rescuing your sweet little arse focuses me in." Annalise replaced her pipe on the fold-out basswood nightstand.

"It's been a second since I've been in tight quarters like that as Annalise, is all. I tend to use Anna when I'm popping down a seraph tunnel or what-have-ye."

"You think about wearing her to the stormship?" She chuckled.

"Saints blessing that I didn't. If I'd have had Anna on, I'd have tossed you out the damn thing. And anyway, I hate using that Verdugo sword even more when I'm her. Just thinking argh grr why can't I have my spear, shit fuck cunt." This she delivered in a butchered Plainland accent.

"Only thing worse than having to use that big gowl of a blade is having to use it in narrow spaces. My horses for a hexis-sucking spadroon, eh?"

"What's a spadroon?"

"Sword." He raised his face from her breasts.

"Sword people have so many names for swords. There should be three kinds of swords. Big swords, small swords, curved swords." She took hold of the back of his head and buried his face back into its soft, cushiony place.

"It's like those wrenches you showed me. The flathead things and all. Half the fun's all the odd names." She was doing something to the hair near the nape of his neck.

"I want a shotel. I've never swung a shotel." He flinched as she tugged his hair.

"What are you doing?"

"Giving you a little rattail," she said.

"Hair's a bit short for it."

"What the hell?" He gave her fingers a light smack.

"You wear a manky little rattail to the next settlement and I'll have forgiven ya, how about."

"You already forgave me. No takebacks."

"Ah, fair play." She undid whatever she'd done to his hair.

"That's the problem with disciplining you, Seth il Gutierre. You're too bleeding cute for giving out."" You're bleedin' cute," he said, in his least convincing Orwinese accent. She giggled.

"G'way outta that."

"Ah sure look, yer a right lash." She cackled.

"Shut up."

"Shut me up," he said, and she kissed him, and that was all they did for a while. Outside, the faint conversation of Tiago and Ofelia approached. Seth hesitated; Annalise hummed into his mouth and didn't.

"Just be quiet, yeah?" she whispered.

"We're just kissing. They're grown. They can handle a closed tent flap." He shrugged at her unimpeachable logic. And so the twins returned to the carriage and the business of preparing for their next village, and Seth stayed in the tent and made out with their mother.

"If you're done screwing, we've gotta let the storm out of the stormship," Tiago called, from beyond the canvas.

"Village is battened down. It'll get thunderous."

"We're not screwing," Annalise called back.

"Stall the ball. Be right out." She gave Seth's lower lip a parting nip and rummaged around in the bedclothes for her underwear. Seth paused his own search as she wriggled into her riding breeches, watched how her heavy thighs bloomed and compressed into them on their way up.

"You're fucking gorgeous, Annalise al Ydris," he said. She laughed and blew a raspberry at him, but she was blushing.

"Get your trousers on, you wee sweet-talker. We've got a stormship to salvage." He sighed and pulled his shirt on—new, crisp, and black, like most of his clothes. Her arms layered atop it; she held him from behind, and her heart pressed against him with her sigh.

"Every time you're off," she whispered.

"I pray to the Saints you'll come back. You better always come back, you hear? Always." Seth brushed his lips against the rearing colt tattoo on her bicep. Sheltered and safe as he was, in the strong arms and good graces of Annalise al Ydris, he drooped and closed his eyes.

"He was looking at me. When he said that stuff. When he talked about being someone new and going crooked all over again, he looked right at me."

"Who? The oul pirate fella?"

"I wonder how he knew. But I think he did. I think it shows on me somehow." He tipped the crown of his head into the graceful curve her neck made with her jaw.

"You know how often I thought I was finished with it? And how many times I ended up back in?" Her arms tightened.

"You're not like him."

"Kind of am."

"No you're not." She turned him around so they were face to ardent face.

"Maybe you could've been, once. But you're not." She closed her hand delicately around the back of his neck. Her grip was so huge her fingers nearly met around his throat. Like a warm, cozy shackle.

"He never belonged anywhere but that stormship. You, little fox." She kissed the tip of his nose.

"You belong to me."