2.8

Griffon,

The Risen Flame

For a time I just leaned against that forward rail, basking in the afterglow of our survival while Sol wrangled the crew. My arms burned, throbbing painfully where I had torn the muscles while acting as an anchor weight. It felt as though my skull had been stuffed full of wool and buzzing insects, the effect only worsening the more I probed my memories in search of answers. Somewhere in that empty space between Olympia and now, my heart’s blood had been reduced even further.

While Sol grilled his men for answers and Selene scampered up the mast to the crow’s nest, I called upon the healing hands of my intent. They spun into being around me, the manifestations of my pneuma made visible by the dry blood that coated each of them from fingertip to wrist, and went to work mending my torn muscles.

I inhaled slowly, steadily, bidding the wheel of channels to move inside my flesh. It obeyed, burning and turning, and to my deep satisfaction I felt the confirmation of a prior suspicion – the burden of my healing hands lightened. The wheel made their efforts twice as effective, for half the prior cost.

Selene beat the Eos’ scarlet sail like an old blanket as she shot up the mast, searching its folds with sharp eyes. Whatever had rattled my brother and I so severely, it hadn’t laid a finger on my sister. She was still every bit the nimble Heroine, while I felt the same way Sol had looked when he staggered out of the Orphic House in Thracia. My brother was little better off than me, remaining on his feet only by virtue of spite and the bronze spear he’d pulled from his shadow to leverage as a walking stick.

Whatever entity it was that had put its filthy hands on our hearts and minds, I didn’t know. Sol didn’t either, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that the crew wouldn’t have anything meaningful to tell him when he asked. Something ominous had taken place on this ship, that much was clear. But there wasn’t a living soul among us that could remember it.

Of course, that still leaves you.

The lingering spirit that called itself my ancestor chuckled, the sound just as I remembered – deep, menacing, and vaguely bored. Of all the lived experiences that had been stolen from me, our thief had left behind the one thing that I’d have freely given.

How cruel.

Selene vaulted up over the lip of the crow’s nest. I sneered at the spirit lingering in my blindside. Cruel, me? No, the true cruelty was a perfectly fine piece of jewelry being wasted on a-

“They’re gone!”

Sol’s head snapped up, the riptide current of his influence sweeping over the ship as he took another count of those on board. I saw it, the moment that he realized what he’d missed. What we had both missed in our torpor.

Selene leaned out from the crow’s nest, panicked. “Lync and Sorea! They’re gone!”

Something flashed behind my brother’s eyes. Something that wasn’t quite terror, wasn’t quite rage. He turned to the men who’d gathered in loose ranks around him, and barked a word I’d never heard before today.

“About face!” That was what the worldly tongue rendered as its meaning, but beneath that, the true word was vertere. A Latin word of power – a captain’s order. It wasn’t the first of its kind that Sol had spoken in the days since he’d taken our crew into the fold. And like the rest that had come before it, I watched it move the men on its own.

As one, like it had been rehearsed, the new men of the Fifth pivoted on their right heels and spun to face the stern. Sol ground his teeth in frustration.

“The ship,” he corrected himself, pressing vainly against the Nile’s current with gravitas. “We have to turn the ship around.”

I waved the bronze boarding hook. “And what? Give the whirlpool a second taste of us?”

“We know the trick of it now.”

“The oars will break long before this river does if we try to row against it,” I told him through our joined shadows. “Even if they were made of adamantine, our crew is not.”

He stared hard at me, his shadow rippling. “Then we beach the ship. Retrace our steps.”

“Retrace them where? I can’t remember a thing. Can you?”

We both reached for some touchstone, some beacon in the wine-dark waves of our recollection, and both of us grimaced as the drums beat double-time against our skulls.

Selene leapt from the crow’s nest, twisting with a Heroine’s careless artistry in midair and pulling her spear from the fold in her silks. I tucked and rolled sideways across the deck, separating my shadow from Sol’s as she thrust her penumbral spear down.

The shadow cast by her spear sank into the shadow cast by Sol, but my brother didn’t dodge. His jaw tightened, and his right hand lashed out to catch the Oracle’s spear by its prophecy-carved shaft. Selene gasped but hung on, hanging a handspan above the surface of the deck. A few of the men eased back, watching her warily. The rest had turned and torn across the deck, overturning rowing benches and calling out the ornery pirate child’s name.

Sol stared flatly at Selene. “Why.”

“You were doing it again.” She glared back at him, dangling. “Cutting me out of things.”

“There are less violent ways to make yourself heard.”

“Less effective ways, perhaps. If I want the two of you to understand me, what choice do I have but to speak your primary language?”

Sol snorted, unimpressed. I raised one hand, the other kneading at my aching temple.

“If I may?” I asked politely.

Two crackling limbs of my intent struck out and speared the soft flesh of my sister’s wrists. She yelped and fell to the deck, her fingers spasming as the lightning current swept through her. When she turned on me, her heart flame flaring, both of my pankration hands smacked her over the head.

“Violence is our native tongue, that much is certainly true,” I said genially, while my foolish little sister tried and failed to smooth down the hair that the lightning current had frazzled. I leaned forward. “But never mind fluent – you’ve yet to string a proper sentence together in this vicious tongue of ours.”

Close enough now to feel the low hum of the lingering static, I lowered my voice to a murmur that only she and Sol could hear.

“Do you recognize every man on this ship?” I asked, and the Heroine went very still.

“What-?”

“Answer the question.”

The scarlet flames behind her eyes flickered. Her gaze darted past me and traced from ragged sea dog to ragged sea dog, paranoid and pondering.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because one of them does not belong.”

Sol stared over our heads, his expression carved from stone.

“What?” Selene whispered, disguising her alarm as anger towards me. “That can’t be. I know all of these men by name-”

“So do I.”

“Then what are you trying to say? There’s a… fake?”

“An interloper.”

She struggled visibly to parse the difference.