The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 2: Strangers: Section II: Vivaen

When they died.

But maybe she had melted some when he kissed her. No—not just melted, she'd been set alight. And lying beside him, she'd slumbered peacefully for the first time since she'd been a young child. She should have told him that much, when she'd had the chance. He'd fallen at her feet spilling words of love, and she'd clutched her truths to her breast and crushed his confessions beneath her toes.

Oh, but his tongue had felt good as it had teased her.

Unlikely that Princess Bree had ever been touched by a man like that, and now she never would be.

Vivaen gazed at the empty bunks dotting this part of the hull—a testament to Bree's chances. Their small party, once composed of male guards, three more serving girls, and one of Bree's cousins, had shrunk to the size of three: Princess Bree, Queen Eaflied, and Vivaen.

Vivaen always survived.

The thought summoned ghosts. She drummed her fingers against her bunk, fending off memories she'd rather keep buried: the smell of damp earth, the grimy walls of the pit, the rain pelting the trees. The clink-clunk of Loralanders approaching, the drag of their carts across the muddy forest floor.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Fuck, but she was stronger than this.

The ship tilted wildly again, jolting Vivaen from the memory to more immediate dangers: Bree's sickness, the possibility of the ship drowning them all before the sickness even mattered. Somehow these thoughts calmed the panic bubbling in her lungs and throat.

At least when Bree died, Vivaen could count on passage home. The chests of gold and silver, of furs and votives, would pass to Vivaen if the disease took princess and queen both—assuming, anyway, that the sailors didn't throw her overboard with the corpses.

Though her long-dead father had been an eastern chieftain—a digan—in his own right, Vivaen could never have been content playing Bree's part. Ostentation was a trap. Bad things happened to you when you were noticed. Better to be forgotten, but alive and happy, loitering at the docks to sell her wares, listening to stories and playing coy with the handsome visitors to Atlin's harbour.

That was all over if Bree lived.

Vivaen swallowed, gaze fixed on the golden-haired girl currently heaving her guts out into a pail, and hope blossomed in Vivaen's belly. If it came to it, she'd rather Bree fall to her fever than be forced to continue the voyage to Qemassen.

Already she missed her home in Atlin, with its surrounding swathes of flatland, its fens, its thick forests of oak and elm. She smiled for a moment, glancing at the wood chest at her feet. All it would take was the wrong vial from Vivaen's collection of medicines, and she could be sure they would make it back to the Feislands.

She wouldn't really do it, of course. She was a bitch, but she wasn't heartless.

A wave rocked the ship, the planks groaning. At the docks back home, sailors told stories of tempests like this, of the monsters the storms whipped into a frenzy. Maybe a monster circled the boat now, battering its serpentine body against the hull, coiling and squeezing the mast till the wood cracked, snapping off the oars.

Bree wailed and Queen Eaflied beckoned Vivaen over. Vivaen made a face, but grabbed her medicines and crept, wobbly from the ship's tipping, to her mistress's side. Bree's eyes were sunken, her lips pale and trembling. Her beautiful curls were limp, scraggly, and puke-caked. Her mother held back her hair while Vivaen rifled through remedies.

"There's not much left," Vivaen warned Eaflied. She shook the small vial of mint and yarrow decoction, making calculations in her head. "We ought to save it."