“They pay her not to be mean to me, though,” I told Anya with a wan smile. She laughed softly, eyes roving over my wardrobe, my trunks, the bed too large for me alone.
I knew what she wanted me to ask.
I wanted to want company. I wanted to feel like myself again.
But the crew’s quarters were already cramped. Whether I wanted to share my room or wallow in private, it didn’t matter.
“Do you want to sleep here?” I forced myself to ask.
“Yes, please,” Anya exclaimed, nodding vigorously. She wriggled across the quilt and under the covers, curling up with her back to the wall. She gave a sigh, eyes sinking closed.
“Better?” I smiled tightly.
Her voice was soft. “It’s like being at home again.”
A lump grew in my throat.
We were a snug fit in the little bed, though hardly a tighter squeeze than we’d been back in her room at Asgard.
But this was nothing like being in Anya’s home.
I didn’t miss Alfödr, or his rules. But Anya had left her adoptive father of her own volition, had run away with Skop’s hand in hers. Torden wouldn’t be waiting for me in the galley when I got up tomorrow, and she had complicated what chance I had of getting back to the father I’d been forced to leave behind.
Even in the dark, Anya must have read my thoughts on my face.
She bit her lip. “I wanted you to be my sister.”
“I wanted to be your sister,” I said. I meant it. But the words hurt.
“I’m glad I’m here anyway.” She squeezed my hand. “I can’t believe I get to stay with Skop. For as long as we want.” Joy radiated from her face.
I was glad to have Anya here, too. Safe, with us. But as much as it shamed me, her happiness was like salt on a wound still raw.
It wasn’t quite fair or true that Anya had gotten her happy ending at the expense of my own. That was her father’s fault.
But it also wasn’t fair that Anya’s happiness took up so much air while I could hardly breathe for mourning what I’d lost. It wasn’t fair that Torden had been taken from me so quickly after I’d found him.
I felt myself avoiding Anya and the others, finding places to hide myself as we crossed the cold sea and, on the fourth day after we left Norge, sailed into the mouth of the Canal Route, a bay called the Jade Bight. It was a bleak place, mud flats and gray beaches rendered stark and barren in too-harsh sunlight, but my jealousy was uglier still. It hurt, and I felt Anya’s hurt every time I hurried away from her and Skop at the table or in our room.
Anya had endured so much; I wanted not to begrudge her joy. I knew she wouldn’t have resented mine, if our places had been reversed. But that only made me feel worse.
I couldn’t help that I wasn’t the person she was. I was no shield-maiden.
My own weakness disappointed me. But avoidance was my only strategy, so my days aboard the Beholder found me everywhere but still. I washed dishes during meals instead of eating with the others, busied myself in my little garden of pots and half barrels instead of joining their circle when we were all on deck. When I let myself rest during the day, I didn’t take to the room I now shared with Anya; I climbed to the crow’s nest with Cobie, taking comfort in her reliable, unvarnished sharpness.
When I had first set sail, first begun to visit courts, first begun to contemplate the role that Alessandra had assigned me, I had felt like our figurehead. I had been the belle in search of her prince, the grand symbol at the fore of our journey with stars in her eyes and slippers on her feet.
But I had left my handsome prince behind me, and the stars in my eyes had been put out.
I felt too damaged to be a symbol anymore. But it didn’t matter. I wanted to be something more than that.
Until I sorted out what that meant—precisely who and what I wanted to be—I kept to the crow’s nest, and kept only Cobie’s company.
We watched the banks along the canals, and then the banks of the Reyn when we passed into it from the Canal Route. The river threaded the bottom of a valley whose walls Cobie once said had been wooded. I tried to imagine it as it must have been—deep green forest shrouding the hills, full of secrets and safe places to hide.
But the banks we sailed past now were lined with outposts for gray-uniformed soldiers and with timberlands ravaged to stumps. Villages carefully contained inside walls were scattered across absolute emptiness; we passed no lonely huts, no stragglers making camp on their own.
We encountered none of the horrors for which the tsarytsya was infamous as we sliced along the edge of her territory. But in the bleak little hamlets and the disenchanted forests we passed, it was impossible to miss what had been lost to this land.
It was impossible to see it all and not think of what lay in wait for us deeper within the Imperiya.
“Will and I weren’t involved. I want you to know that,” Cobie suddenly said to me, about a week after we’d fled Asgard. “We knew, but we didn’t help. All I did was watch for the Beholder’s return from Odense.”
I nodded.
“We needed the work. That’s why when Lang told the crew we were making a cargo run as well, I didn’t leave.” A gust of wind lifted her dark hair from her shoulders, and she pushed a tangle behind her ear. “He said the only rule was we all had to keep our mouths shut around Perrault and J.J. And you, of course.”
“Of course,” I echoed hollowly, swallowing hard. “And everyone else knew?”
Cobie nodded. “Yasumaro and Jeanne were like me and Will, though. They knew, but they mostly stayed out of it.” She paused. “‘Cela ne me concerne pas,’ Jeanne kept saying.”
It’s none of my business.
I nodded, reviewing the rest of them in my mind. Lang. Yu. Homer. Andersen. Vishnu. Basile. Skop. They had all done this behind my back.
I gnawed my lip. “Why didn’t he just tell me?” I asked.
“We didn’t know you,” Cobie said. “And once we did—I think Lang thought you were safest not knowing. You were already walking into so much uncertainty. He wanted to protect you.”
That’s our place, Lang had told me. That’s where we belong. Between you and everyone else.
I envied his surety.
We sailed on, the riverbanks slipping past us. The sky above was unlike Norge’s bright blue or England’s soft pearl-colored light; it was a sulfurous yellow-gray, the sun shining high and harsh on the earth left bare between the hacked-down stumps. “Why is so much of this forest cut down?” I asked.
“I think the tsarytsya’s soldiers did it,” Cobie said, squinting against the unforgiving light. “She and her wolves laid claim to the timber after they conquered Deutschland.”
Again, I imagined the forests as they must have been—quiet, a home for animals and for those who preferred their own company. “And they left no place to hide.”
Cobie cocked an eyebrow at me. “There’s always someplace to hide, Selah.” She nodded significantly at the two of us, sitting high above deck in the crow’s nest.
“I’m not hiding,” I bit out.
“Prove it.”
“Fine,” I snapped.
Cobie was right. It was time to face the others.
I clambered down the rope, bypassing Yasumaro and his searching gaze at the helm as I made my way to Homer’s cabin, where I’d seen him convened with Andersen, Yu, and Lang earlier. Lang’s quarters would have done, as well, but our navigator inspired confidence—a cast-iron belief the others seemed to lean on, as well.