Chương 177: 19. All Aboard 2

I stared at her for two more seconds, then decided to abandon the line of questioning entirely. The reasoning was straightforward. First: even if I asked, she almost certainly wouldn't give me a straight answer. Second: based on accumulated experience, anything she chose to mention in passing tended to be considerably more troubling than it sounded.

Third: I had already encountered enough stomach-turning material today, and I genuinely did not want to add the full scope of Dragon Kingdom royal emergency funds to my current inventory of psychological damage. So I simply offered a sincere summary.

"I'm beginning to feel I had a very shallow understanding of what wealth disparity actually means." Ignicia smoothed the edge of her glove.

"That's because your frame of reference was too limited before."

"I was a Kingdom noble."

"Now you're a tar-scented cargo hand."

"... You have a genuine gift for identifying exactly the thing a person least wants to hear and saying it." She didn't respond to that. But when she turned away, I could have sworn the corner of her mouth moved—barely, the kind of movement that could almost be blamed on the shifting lamplight. Almost. That fraction of an expression was enough to keep this room—a room that had recently hosted a corpse, whose air still carried traces of poison and blood—from pressing down quite so heavily on the chest.

I looked down at the cargo handler disguise I still hadn't fully shed, and exhaled slowly.

"So. What now?"

"Survive until tomorrow morning," she said.

"Remarkably practical advice."

"You're welcome." Fine. Discussing survival strategy with her was sometimes like asking a blade why it needed to be sharp. It wasn't that it couldn't answer—it simply didn't consider the question worth explaining. We spent most of what remained of that day without going out. Not from reluctance. But because Blackbeard Bay's streets had stopped being a place where we could browse, navigate, or gather information—and had become a surface where every step might land on a Raven's feather.

Marro's people moved us to new lodgings. Not the mold-enthusiastic crawl space beneath the repair shed this time, but a small second-floor room tucked behind Salt Dog Wharf, its exterior presenting as a dilapidated harbormaster's office. The room was compact, the window narrow enough to discourage entry, the floorboards hard enough to suggest someone had deliberately engineered against deep sleep. Under the circumstances, these qualities were reassuring rather than objectionable.

At minimum, it didn't resemble the Old Captain—where a stranger with a drink could wander upstairs at any moment and decide to take more than the ambiance. I managed a proper hot bath in an actual wooden tub.

The water was only genuinely hot for the first quarter hour, the second quarter sustained entirely by willpower, but after rinsing away a full day's accumulation of salt, tar, ash, blood, and several other substances whose origins I preferred not to examine—I offered the universe a sincere, private acknowledgment of gratitude for not ending yet.

When I emerged from behind the screen in clothes that finally resembled something a normal traveler might wear, Ignicia was sitting by the window, working at a piece of bread that had achieved the texture of compressed timber. She glanced up.

"You look human again." I adjusted my collar.

"Is that a compliment?"

"A generous stretch."

"Could you manage one straightforwardly kind thing to say, just occasionally?"

"Certainly." She considered it.

"You're worth slightly more than you were an hour ago." I was quiet for a moment. Then I seriously considered whether taking her bread away and eating it in front of her would constitute adequate emotional expression. In the end I simply sat in the other chair, accepted the piece she tossed toward me, and chewed in silence while watching the window. Blackbeard Bay at night was even more like overcooked soup than it had been during the day. Dock lights scattered in broken clusters.

Ship masts rose from the sea fog like a row of crooked black bones. From somewhere in the distance came sailors shouting, women laughing, cups colliding, an argument escalating, and what sounded like an unfortunate individual being introduced to the bottom of a staircase against his will. Loud. Yet the noise felt like foam on the surface of something—the kind that disperses the moment you push through it, leaving nothing but filth underneath.

"Can you sleep?" I asked, without quite planning to.

"Yes," she said, biting off a small piece of bread, her expression undisturbed.

"You can't?"

"It's not that I can't..." I paused.

"My mind just won't stop." The mountain ambush. The living spring on the island. The ancient thing sleeping in the water below. Then Blackbeard Bay, the auction house, the Ravens, Queen Wahlin—the threads were finally showing their knots. And the problem was that those knots didn't look like anything a sword could cut through. Ignicia didn't answer immediately.

She looked out at the darkness beyond the window—harbor lights and sea fog dissolving into each other—and after a moment said, quietly: This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"If you can't sleep, remember one thing."

"What?"

"Stop thinking of this as an escape that belongs only to the two of us." I looked at her. She turned her head. In the dim lamplight, her golden eyes were still—the last point of light left when a fire has burned down to its final breath.

"Blackbeard Bay. The Ravens. The northern cylinder. The Spear of Light. The Dragon Kingdom. Eckhaus." She named them one by one, her voice low, each word landing like a nail driven cleanly into wood.

"You're already inside this. It's no longer a question of whether you want to be involved. Even if you tried to step back, no one would allow it." My hand paused on the bread. I had understood this rationally for some time. But certain truths, spoken in her particular register of calm, carry a weight that intellectual understanding doesn't prepare you for. Because it wasn't comfort. It wasn't encouragement. It was reality. The most infuriating kind. Also the most useful. I smiled without much warmth.

"You have a remarkable talent for making people feel worse at exactly the wrong moment."

"If you want to hear something pleasant, there are tavern girls at the docks tomorrow."

"I'm afraid you'd incinerate me with a look before I got a word out."

"That would suggest you have some self-awareness after all." Wonderful. She was in a good mood tonight, apparently. Still had energy to spare for targeted damage. In a strange way, that was reassuring. Because if she ever stopped being sharp, that would be the sign that things had truly gone beyond recovery. I did eventually sleep.

Not deeply—the dreams were a chaotic mix of snowfields, underground shipyards, auction houses, and that single word everything—but my body managed to reclaim enough functional energy before dawn to be worth having. The next morning, I was pulled awake by the cries of harbor birds and the first round of dock shouts. Blackbeard Bay's morning was not what I had expected.

After everything from the previous day, I had anticipated something appropriately ominous—a port that looked darker, heavier, like a sea surface before a storm. There was none of that. It was just as loud as always. Just as filthy. People were arguing, hauling cargo, cursing at fate while still half-drunk from the night before. That was the remarkable thing about this place. No matter how rotten the interior, the surface kept doing business first.

I finished getting my equipment in order and came downstairs to find Ignicia already waiting at the door. She had changed back into traveling clothes—a dark cloak that kept her silhouette clean and efficient, hair bound up, the lines of her shoulders and waist contained under the fabric. She looked nothing like the high-value display piece from the auction house yesterday. Except that wasn't quite right either.

Because the quality she had of not belonging to ordinary crowds—that couldn't be concealed by any amount of practical clothing. She glanced at me.

"Let's go."

"Aren't you tired?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

"Yes."

"Then why do you look completely unaffected?" She considered this.

"Because unlike you, I don't write every emotion across my face."

"I'm not that obvious." She looked me over once, top to bottom.

"Right now you look like someone heading to a date and someone heading to an execution, simultaneously."

"... You can't honestly claim those two things feel very different to me at this point." She made a soft sound, turned, and walked out. I followed her down the morning-damp wooden stairs, and was struck by a very strange feeling. If someone had told me a few days ago that I would be walking through a harbor full of pirates and smugglers at dawn, heading to meet a one-eyed ship captain for an illegal departure, while simultaneously evading an imperial intelligence network— I would have assumed they'd been drinking.

And yet here I was, and this was my most sensible scheduled activity of the day. Life had a particular talent for training people into the exact shape they had previously found most incomprehensible. The west side of Salt Dog Wharf, Pier Three, was quieter than I had expected. Not empty—but the people there carried a specific quality of silence that said I know exactly what I'm doing here, and you'd do well not to ask.

Several ships were moored nearby, their exteriors unremarkable, some actively unloading, some taking on supplies, some simply sitting. Everyone in any port knows that the most ordinary-looking vessels are usually the ones worth watching. The sea wind carried salt, timber, rope, and the particular cold of wet iron that has been drying in open air without quite finishing.

I was scanning the line of hulls, about to ask which ship was Marro's, when I heard that voice—the one I had already grown familiar enough with to want to hit.

"You actually showed up on time." One-Eyed Marro stood at the far end of the pier, one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding a cup of something hot and deeply suspicious in color, his tone carrying a particular brand of surprised disapproval.

"Is that a compliment?" I asked, walking over.

"No." He looked at me, then at Ignicia.

"I had simply prepared myself—if you were a quarter hour late, I was going to consider those two Dragon Scale coins yesterday as payment for my goodwill today."

"You actually have that?"

"Occasionally." He took a sip from the cup.

"Typically lasts under fifteen minutes." I didn't bother engaging further, and let my eyes move past his shoulder to the ship behind him. A two-masted fast brigantine. Not large, but compact in a way that suggested everything unnecessary had been stripped away, leaving only speed, stability, and whatever armaments the situation might require. The hull was painted a pressed, dark brown-black, with a deep red stripe along the edge that nearly disappeared into the grain if you weren't looking for it.

The figurehead was a sea serpent biting a dagger—the carving worn by salt wind and sea air, which somehow made it look more alive rather than less. So this was the one he had mentioned.

"My ship," Marro said, with the mildness of someone who had noticed me looking.

"She's called Tidesever."

"That doesn't sound like a name associated with safe returns."

"That's because you have no appreciation for good ship names."

"No—I simply have limited trust in captains who drag their passengers down with them." Marro smiled without denying it. At that moment I noticed the people on deck. Four of them. Not one of whom suggested easy nights and uneventful crossings. A tall, lean man coiling rope while yawning, one side of his face carrying an old scar that looked like it had been made by something with a hook.

A short-haired woman with dark skin, cleaning a flintlock, who looked up at our arrival and assessed us with the specific gaze of someone calculating which port we'd make it to. A young man who looked barely old enough to be here, sitting at the base of the mast eating an apple with a short blade at his hip worn in a way that suggested long familiarity—watching us with the expression of someone who had bought tickets to a show. The fourth stood at the helm without moving, watching from a distance.

Wide-brimmed hat, face unreadable from here. But the posture alone told me everything my instincts needed to know. There was not a single low-maintenance person on this ship.

"Nervous?" Marro asked beside me.

"Calculating," I said.

"What exactly?"

"If this ship goes down today, whether I'm more likely to drown first or get eaten by fish." He nodded with what appeared to be genuine approval.

"That kind of clarity before boarding usually correlates with longer survival rates."

"That sentence provided zero comfort."

"It wasn't intended to." He finished the suspicious hot drink in one swallow, handed the empty cup to a passing crew member without looking, and turned to face the ship.

"Drop the board! Passengers are here!" The apple-eating young man on deck produced a short whistle. Two crew members lowered the gangplank with practiced efficiency—wood meeting pier with a single, unhurried thud. That sound felt like a boundary. Step across it, and you had officially left shore behind. I looked back at Blackbeard Bay—still loud, still filthy, still conducting its morning business with cheerful indifference to everything that had happened within its walls.

And now, underneath all that familiar noise, I could feel it: the invisible net, spread and patient, threaded with black feathers. Going back would be the genuinely stupid choice. Ignicia stepped onto the gangplank ahead of me. Her cloak caught the sea wind and lifted slightly. Her back was straight, her stride unhesitating. I watched that silhouette and felt something settle quietly in my chest—not quite peace, not quite resignation, but something adjacent to both. Of course.

She never looked back to check whether I was following. Because in her assessment, that was simply never a question worth asking.

"Cedric." She stopped at the midpoint of the gangplank and turned her head slightly, her voice carrying its usual unhurried precision.

"Are you planning to take root down there?" I pulled the corner of my mouth up.

"Coming." I stepped onto the gangplank. The wood shifted slightly under my foot with a quiet creak. Sea wind met me directly—carrying deeper salt, carrying the water-smell of distances I hadn't crossed yet.