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1.
Seabirds circled around the ship’s masts, shrieking and diving into the rising tide as the wooden vessel rocked about in its berth. Gray clouds were thick on the northern horizon, their edges streaked by the fading sun’s light—gold, orange, pink, and violet. Beautiful to some, but just weather to Kaz. He wasn’t staring to admire it, only debating what it meant for the journey. Would a storm delay him getting back to the Crow Club? Would Inej face the same storm, somewhere out on those waters? How far had she sailed yet?
Laughter boomed like a cannon.
Kaz nearly startled. Nearly. It wasn’t something he showed. He turned around, quite composed, expression neutral as it ever was.
His eyes narrowed slightly at the sight of Jesper stumbling up the dock, dodging sailors and cargo, with an armful of Wylan, who had hands around his neck and his face buried in his chest. Wylan, at a glance, looked like a man possessed of Ghezen, wildly convulsing.
Apparently, he was in a fit of laughter.
Kaz could hear it as they drew nearer—that irritating sound.
He debated boarding ahead of them, but Jesper’s stupor had him quickly reconsidering. They might pass him by on the gangplank and push him right off into the water, too drunk to even realize.
Looove drunk, cooed a voice in his mind, sounding suspiciously like Nina. It used to be that only Jordie’s voice was there, but now, as if his skull had become kind of aviary, there were more and more the presence of his Crows—their voices and feathers and bird shit—
“Kapitein, mayn Kapitein!” greeted Jesper jovially as he approached with Wylan, who poked up his head and had the nerve to flash a shy smile—as if Kaz could believe there was any ounce of shame in him.
“I’m not your Captain,” said Kaz, “but I am your boss, so perhaps, in the future, you might both consider the merits of being punctual.”
Jesper half-laughed, half-scoffed. “Oh, come on, it’s barely past six bells and the ship’s not leaving yet, is it? We were only a little late because someone had to have a look in at a certain tea shop…”
“Jesper!” Wylan exclaimed, slapping at his chest. “That’s not—”
Kaz held up a gloved hand. “I don’t care,” he deadpanned. “Just… get on the ship. And for the love of all Saints, pick separate cabins.”
Wylan flushed right to the tips of his ears as Jesper laughed, loud and wolfish. “No promises!” he sang as he swept Wylan up the gangplank, Wylan’s backpack bouncing on Jesper’s shoulders.
Sighing, Kaz tipped his head back to look up at the sky.
If any god could hear him thinking, he wouldn’t quite mind to die.
2.
That night at dinner, Kaz was unfortunate to be late. He had left his cabin just as the sea was growing vicious, and the time it took him, with his cane, to get up the stairs and into the dining quarters meant, when he arrived, he was stuck sitting across from Jesper and Wylan.
He glowered at them across the table as he cut into his steak. This, the finest meal by far they would have on the journey, and of course, it would be spoiled by this scene of Wylan giggling as he fed Jesper from his fork. Their meals were the same. What was even the point?
Kaz cleared his throat loudly, but neither of them acknowledged it.
The crew tucked in around them, plus Nina at the farthest end of the table, didn’t look at him, either. No one else seemed to notice where Jesper’s hand was going, or how Wylan’s guilty blush betrayed him.
Kaz kicked his leg out under the table, catching Jesper in the knee.
“Ow,” said Jesper, looking accusingly across at Kaz, who just gave a shrug and muttered something about a “muscle spasm” as he sawed another piece of his steak off, imagining it as a certain appendage—
Not his own, of course. His mind had mastered his body.
What he dreamt of sometimes—that was out of anyone’s control.
3.
Some hours later, as the rain began to spatter on the deck, Kaz gave up standing at the rail, looking out into the darkness—for what, he didn’t know. His mind had been empty. It was something like peace.
Moving down through the levels and into the hall where guests and crew alike had their cabins, Kaz was disgruntled by the sound of a creaking hammock and Jesper’s voice, filtering out an open door:
“Lackaday! And what is the world coming to? In these days, there is not an honest man to be met with. Did I not with my own eyes see Sindbad drown? And now you have the audacity to tell me…”
Kaz rolled his eyes. He knew the story. The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor. Jesper was reading aloud through the first voyage, and he was doing it with a passion to have entertained a crowd of orphans. Jordie used to do the same for Kaz, many years ago, before... all of it.
The thought made Kaz clamp down harder on his cane. He hadn’t meant to stop to listen, but that’s where he found himself now—out in the hallway, like some kind of idiot. The ship lurched to one side, then the other, and Kaz grunted with the effort to stay upright. He needed to get to his cabin, give his leg a break, and try to sleep—
He shuffled forward, while practically slamming his cane down to announce his presence. He wasn’t about to take any chances when the two idiots in the cabin he was about to pass hadn’t so much as the decency to close the door on their Saints-forsaken little nest…
“As to your goods,” Jesper was reading on, “I pray you take them, and dispose of them as you please. Sindbad thanked him, and…”
Kaz paused outside the threshold, catching the sight of Wylan laid over Jesper’s chest, staring adoringly up at him as Jesper read from the book he had propped against Wylan’s shoulder. Without a word to them, Kaz swung his cane inside to hook the doorknob, pulled it it shut with a loud bang, and then continued down the hallway—
“Good night to you, too, Boss!” Jesper hollered through the wood.
4.
Kaz woke early the next day to a steady ship on a calm sea and the sight of dawn through a porthole. He laid in his hammock for a long while, having fished out a book from his satchel. Rabinov’s Cantos—
A parting gift from Tolya. He’d had no reason to accept it.
Truth, he wanted to burn it.
He didn’t care to understand why. He just acknowledged the feeling as he stared at the book, not even opening the cover. He stared at it a long time, until his mind turned to breakfast, and all of a sudden—
One of the cabin doors slammed open in the hallway, making Kaz arch an eyebrow as shrieking seemed to spill out from it, followed by the sound of thumping footsteps, like two ponies gotten loose.
He sighed, turned his stiff legs slowly out of the hammock, and listened as the sound of footsteps faded up the stairs toward the upper deck of the ship.
Eventually, with little options in front of him, Kaz made the climb to the upper deck, as well. He took a seat on a crate near the hatch he’d come up from, unimpressed at the sight of Jesper and Wylan wildly romping about beneath the brightening sky. They were acting like children, playing some sort of “tag” game. Honestly, he thought.
Jesper ran up behind Wylan, grabbed him tight around the middle and started spinning him around as Wylan laughed and kicked his feet out, nearly taking out one of the ship’s crew—
Kaz snorted as he watched them reprimanded by the crewmate.
Good.
They should be embarrassed.
They looked like puppies trying to understand an angry human.
Shaking his head, Kaz turned his gaze away. He wasn’t sure at first if he had a reason for it, until he saw the ship—a blotch at a distance, but he was sure what it was. Not her ship, though it could have been. He didn’t hope it was anymore than he didn’t. He just… watched it.
5.
Seabirds shrieked, flying out from the ports of Ketterdam. Night had fallen over the city, but the birds were active still, greeting every ship with a keen eye to its cargo. This one, having little to interest them, sailed on through to its harbour with only a few birds in its ropes.
“Ketterdam!” Jesper yelled out over the water, his arms outstretched to the cluster of lights and shadowed buildings. “How I missed you!” He dropped his arms and turned to Wylan with a grin, nudging him in the shoulder. “Good to be home, right?” Wylan just smiled at him.
Kaz suppressed an eye-roll. Home, indeed, he thought.
But was it home without her? He squashed the traitorous thought with a thump of his cane, vaguely alarmed that that voice inside was his.
The ship moved slowly into berth at the bustling Third Harbour, and Kaz watched the sailors scurry to throw down ropes to waiting men, who tied the ship off to the docks. It was a noisy affair, but for some reason, what sounded much louder were lips smacking together—
He shot an irritated look at Jesper and Wylan, and though it seemed to him that Jesper was all but drowning in Wylan’s face, he saw his oldest friend squint one eye open, meeting his eyes—and then—
Jesper raised one finger, held behind Wylan’s back.
Kaz narrowed his eyes. He adjusted his cane, started walking for the gangplank, which was about to be lowered. “Thin ice,” he practically hissed at Jesper as he passed behind him, accidentally on purpose swiping his leg with his cane—just enough it might bruise him.
Kaz knew restraint. Let them say what they would.