Kari’s face went gray. “I only recently learned of my husband’s deceit—”
“Stop acting so goddamn proud.” Vex’s arms shook so hard he had to cross them. “If you’d realized earlier that your own husband was a fucking spy, Lu might not be dead.”
The last word hung on his tongue. He wanted to say it again, let it stick to someone else.
Kari’s lips parted. “What did you say?”
He saw Lu’s body slip to the deck of the ship. Her eyes searched for him, her face shocked and scared and alone, with just Ben to hold her, because Edda threw Vex overboard.
He’d left Lu. He’d left Ben, too.
“I said she’s dead,” Vex growled. “Lu’s dead. Thanks to you and your husband.”
Kari dropped onto a chair. Her silence was worse than if she’d started weeping, grief so tangible on her face that a fierce stab of guilt punctured Vex’s heart.
“Or maybe you knew about your husband all along,” he spat at Kari. “Maybe you’re a spy too. Maybe you’re glad Lu’s gone. You’re as guilty as—”
“Paxben!” Edda cried.
Vex’s body went stiff. That name from her—that name at all—struck him dumb.
Edda grabbed his arm. “You have to stop. You can’t drop this on someone!”
“But it was dropped on me!”
Vex’s scream rebounded, the tremble in his voice from both Shaking Sickness and grief.
Edda’s face was broken. Nayeli wiped at her eyes, her gold skin blotchy. If the two of them looked that bad, he must look like hell in human form. Cansu seemed caught between remorse and confusion about why Edda had called Vex Paxben.
Booted feet pounded in the hall—soldiers, coming to check on the noise in Kari’s room.
Vex rolled his eye shut. Dumbass. They were supposed to be on a stealth mission.
Cansu barked a strand of curses in Thuti and shot to the door, dragging behind her furniture to make a barricade. “Nayeli—Blossoms, now!”
Edda helped Cansu stack chairs, a table, a curved divan. Nayeli pulled the Aerated Blossoms out of a bag on her belt.
“Vex—” Nayeli started, but he snatched a Blossom from her and stomped to the balcony.
The lake was a straight shot down. The wall of the castle gave way to jagged cliff and blue water, with one of Cansu’s steamboats bobbing in the waves. To the left, all Vex could see of the courtyard was the back of the platform, plumes of smoke rising from pyres that were out of sight.
The screaming had stopped.
Cansu braced her body against the furniture barricade. “Andreu—you’re first!”
Kari hadn’t moved from her straight-backed seat on the chair, her hands poised on the armrests. But as soldiers pushed against the barricade so the furniture peeled across the floor, Kari sprang to her feet, her eyes on Vex as if no one else was there.
Maybe she wanted him to feel her own blame. Maybe she hated him like he hated her.
“No,” she stated. “I won’t—”
Cansu shouted in frustration and launched herself away from the barricade. She grabbed an Aerated Blossom, thrust it at Kari, and drove her body into the Senior Councilmember to send her tumbling over the balcony railing.
Edda and Nayeli objected, but Cansu ignored them. She took Blossoms from Nayeli, left her one, handed another to Edda, and shoved Nayeli backward so hard she sank into the air with only a parting gasp.
The soldiers bellowed a warning. They cracked the door open enough for Vex to see them in the hall—defensors in the Church’s navy-and-white uniforms. Alongside them, Vex caught a flash of blond hair. The glint of crocodile skin. Mecht raiders from the syndicate that Elazar had convinced to work with him.
“Go,” Cansu ordered Edda.
Vex nodded at her, and she leaped over the railing.
The barricade tumbled, chairs falling across the marble, the divan tipping on its side. Defensors clambered into the room on a sharp cry of victory. Two furiously focused Mecht raiders charged in, crocodiles seeking prey in bloody waters.
Vex dropped to the floor as a bullet pinged off a silver bowl and another lodged in the ceiling. Cansu rolled behind a couch and Vex dove after her, plaster scattering around them. She already had a pistol out and she cocked it, her eyes on the balcony.
“I’ll cover you,” she said.
“Like hell you will. Nay’ll kill me if you—”
“STOP ARGUING.” Cansu swung onto her knees and fired back at the soldiers. “For once in your life, you idiot, listen! Go—I’ll be right behind you!”
Vex looked at the soldiers, clustered behind an overturned table. He cursed and pointed at Cansu. “I’m not making a habit of listening to you,” he told her and scrambled away.
He swore he heard her laugh as bullets whistled past.
Vex didn’t process how close he was to getting shot until he heaved himself over the balcony and wished he had gotten shot. It would’ve been less awful than free-falling to his death.
A scream tore from his lungs. The tang of salt and sweat from the crowded port consumed Vex as he fell, down, down, down, the blue of the lake opening wide to swallow him.
The Aerated Blossom made it to his lips. His body absorbed the flight-giving gases in the few seconds it took to inhale them, yanking him to a brief pause. The gases released, and he dropped into the lake with a soft splash.
Hands hauled him onto a steamboat. Vex hacked water from his lungs and straightened his eye patch as he looked up at the balcony. Rocks held the castle in the air, and the balcony—terrifyingly high up, how had he jumped that?—stayed empty for one second, two, three—
Cansu appeared, bent halfway over the railing. One hand braced on the stone, the other reached down, fingers spread toward the boat. Toward Nayeli.
Defensors swarmed the balcony.
Vex couldn’t breathe.
Cansu teetered forward, airborne. She was going to make it—
Defensors caught her around the waist and hauled her, kicking and snarling, out of sight.
Even if Vex hadn’t been on a boat, the world would’ve shifted.
“Cansu!” Nayeli tore to her feet, dripping water across the deck. “CANSU!”
“Nay—stop!” Edda grabbed her. “Don’t draw their attention! We knew this could happen—she’s alive, she’s a prisoner, but she’s—”
“A prisoner of Elazar,” Nayeli clarified, trembling.
Vex wasn’t sure how he had room for worry alongside his grief. He stayed crouched on the deck, staring up at Nayeli, realization sinking in a slow shudder down his arms.
He’d left Cansu. Like Ben. Like Lu.
“He’ll kill her,” Nayeli said to Edda, dark eyes red with tears. The raiders who’d been driving the steamboat stayed in the pilothouse, their faces mirroring Nayeli’s concern.
“Not immediately.”
Behind them, Kari’s dark hair stuck to her cheeks, her eyes glassy. She was definitely where Lu got her Tuncian traits—golden brown skin, curly black hair, round dark eyes.
“I heard that Elazar holds most of his captives in Port Camden until he can decide what to do with them,” Kari continued, looking to the northeastern jungle. “He only left the Senior Councilmembers here so he could make it look as though the Council had allied with him.”