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Althea Boyle is nearly sixteen and has lived half her life in Driscol. Her accent has changed. She can slide from the proper vowels of Dunwall aristocracy to a scandalous Morley lilt in an instant. It makes for a good party trick.
Everything she can do makes for a good party trick, or can be applied at parties, can be spun into something acceptable and genteel and deceptively safe. This is useful. This is a necessity. The men of Driscoll are still missing eyes and limbs and compassion from the Insurrection – and with Morley such a short way across the strait, not all of them fought for the same side. It is dangerous to be a Dunwall girl with a scandalous name so far from the family who can protect her.
It is dangerous to be a girl, of any sort, anywhere; it is also lovely. Althea likes to walk along the beach in the mornings, while the mist is white and solid enough to shield her from prying eyes. She could bring a boy down here, and no one would know; she could murder down here, conduct rites to the Outsider, and no one would know at all. The sea is quiet and the sand is strewn with soft weeds of red and deep green and bruise purple, and thunderclouds rumble just offshore. North, in Morley waters. South, in Dunwall, where her aunts still live, where the Empire turns on their whim.
The Boyle name brings her privileges. The Boyle name brings rumors and gossip that swirl around her like opium smoke. Heady and sweet and horrible. When Althea was twelve, she woke one morning to whore scrawled in red paint above her dormitory bed. When Hiram Burrows hiked taxes all around the Empire, there was a man who spit at Althea’s feet called after her with suggestions for what acts her mother might do to make him change his mind. When some of the girls snuck away from their tutors and held a séance in the library attic, they turned to Althea for questions – you’ve done this with your aunt, what’s it like, how many men has she killed or had killed, how does she arrange the bones, how does the blood taste?
She has learned to slide her accent from Dunwall to Driscoll in an instant, to slide her frown into a smile, to twist words and give them back as useless little things that are exactly what people expect. Her mother is proud of her. Her aunts are proud of her.
After quarantine is lifted, Althea returns to Dunwall for the summer and winter holidays. It is a strange thing. The city is held on tenterhooks and her mother is at the Tower more often than naught, her aunt Lydia at the Abbey, her aunt Waverly vanished as if she’s stumbled upon some of the Outsider’s magic. The servants do not know how to treat her. She is neither a guest nor a true member of the family. She finds herself in the attic, often, digging through trunks, finding the war medals of a father she does not remember, finding portraits of the grandparents she has never, ever met. She is a ghost walking through a great house that should belong to her but does not. Not quite.
At least, she thinks, she is not caged in a tower and dressed in antiseptic white.
When she returns to Driscol and to boarding school, she learns acceptable things; and Lydia pulls strings and whispers in ears and ensures that she learns some things that are not acceptable, either. The school hires a tutor from the Academy of Natural Philosophy. This is why she does not fully return to Dunwall – so that the Brimbsleys and Whites and Ramsays will not know that she has been trained in astronomy and anatomy as well as the proper way to hold a dinner fork.
(Survival, one of her aunts had once told her, is not something we are supposed to know)
She wonders when they will teach her to pull and catch and use the lightning from the sky.
Two days after the Lord Regent falls and the Empress takes his place, one day before the news reaches Driscol, Althea Boyle receives a letter from a courier who will not answer her questions. The wax seal is one that has not been seen, not been used, since the death of Jessamine Kaldwin. Hiram Burrows had always favored the title of Regent over Spymaster, after all, and was loathe to hire another man to take his old position; the seal of Dunwall’s master of secrets has been gathering dust in a drawer for years. Althea’s skin prickles as she breaks it open.
(There are no thunderclouds in the sky. There should be)
I suspect, Waverly has written, in a fine and slanted hand, that by the time you receive this letter you will have received the news as well; and I suspect that in a week or little more this title will be mine in truth. Formalities and uniforms and all. It is so satisfying to see the plans you’ve been working toward for years finally bear fruit.
If all goes well, the Boyle family will have its position secured in the light of the throne for many years to come. This seems like an excellent time to introduce you to society, and to the young Empress.
She is precisely your age. She enjoys painting. I believe you will like each other.
Come home.
*****
She has never left Dunwall. She has simply been forgotten.
This is not a difficult thing to do. Dunwall has forgotten much in the years since Jessamine’s death. No one remembers the way Rudshore used to look, or who used to live in a little apartment with a southward-facing window and clean white paint on the walls. No one remembers what it was truly like before quarantine, before curfew, before the gangs ruled all the streets instead of just a dangerous few. No one remembers the plans of an admiral who stole a ship in one last mad stand, an Overseer who broke out of the stocks like the Outsider himself, an inventor whose works washed into the river; no one remembers or cares about their plans, the things they’d wished to do, the day it all came crashing down when the city watch kicked in the pub door.
There have been many attempted rebellions, coups, and assassinations. The Watch thwarts some and the Whalers stop the rest before they have a chance to begin. No one remembers the Loyalists. No one remembers the ones who worked below them.
No one had remembered to count the servants.
Dunwall forgot her; but then, it had never noticed her to begin with. She lives on the fringes of the condemned districts for years. She does not catch the plague. She takes odd jobs, washing, sewing, sweeping, picking gold from the teeth of the dead, smuggling letters, putting up signs and tearing them down. She does not ever need to kill, or sell her body, or sell her brilliant red hair that should give people cause to remember her but doesn’t. She just continues. Ghostlike. She told someone, once, that the plague was the end of the world and the end of everything, that nothing could return to the way it was; and she thinks that perhaps this is true.
The days grow greyer. The rains come, and do not leave. The water rises. When she goes to Rudshore, and she stands on a teetering bit of wreckage at the foot of a boarded-up apartment with a southward window, the rain pocks and roughens the surface of the water so that she cannot see what lies beneath it – furniture, old timbers, bones. It disrupts the surface of the water so that she cannot even make out her own face.
It rains, and rains, and Dunwall washes away from her, and the rain goes on. And so does she.
When the young Empress speaks on the loudspeaker in a voice that is small and tiny and blazing, when the Lord Regent’s confession thunders over the city, when the dawn breaks on bells ringing over Holger Square, Cecelia looks upward and smiles, truly, for the first time in years and years.
She has never left the city. It has merely left her.
Perhaps it will return again.
*****
It storms off the coasts of Serkonos.
Sometimes it is the captain’s fault, summoned winds clawing at the sails and snapping the masts of their pursuers. Waves toss their ship like a top but do not topple it. Never. The rain falls grey and freezing and sideways. In the vortex of the storm that is Lizzy Stride, it falls upwards, and her laughter is caught in the rising-falling water and made wild until it doesn’t sound of this world at all.
In the madness of the Regent’s reign, the Dead Eels have moved from the river to the sea where they can wreak a madness of their own. Lizzy Stride can warp the wind with her mind, and slide through the walls of her ship, and when they are far at sea the whales gather around the fragile hull and sing to her. When there are no others of the crew around, Billie has heard her singing back. It does not raise the hairs on the nape of her neck. It does not chill her flesh. It merely makes her rub at her hand where there is no Outsider’s mark, makes her summon what power remains to her and transverse up the rigging where she can see the space all around her, the open sea and open sky, the little ship adrift in the middle of the empty and the empty.
When she was a child, Billie Lurk had wanted to be the captain of such a ship. When she was a child, the shark-toothed smile of this woman would have frightened her, startled her, impressed her. Now, she sees it as the gimmick it is.
Daud has no need for gimmicks.
(Has, not had. There are storms off the coasts of Serkonos, and Billie is only afraid of the ones that are not the captain’s fault. That come from Dunwall in the north and bear news and lightning on the wind)
Daud has no need for anything. Billie walked in his shadow and stood by his marked left hand for over half her life. She knows this. She knows the intricacies and necessities of the armor the man keeps wrapped around him, the bitterness, the smell of his particular tobacco smoke, the way he speaks short words to his men and expects the same in return. Lizzie Stride storms, startles, shocks, smiles at her marks with teeth filed sharp as knives. Daud is a professional, does not smile at all, and his marks have no time to be startled because they die before they know he is there.
He is better than her. He is better than this.
He has no need for Dunwall’s political games and the Boyle woman who keeps him caught around her little finger.
Daud has spent the years taming the streets for the serpent Waverly Boyle, and so Billie Lurk has spent the years transversing ever away, blinking from storm to storm and never letting her feet touch solid ground. When the seas tear and the sky breaks and the storms come from the north, she presses the newspapers from Dunwall flat in her little cabin and reads between the lines. Reads of the rise of the Boyle family and the streets fallen to an ever-larger gang, a strange alliance between the Regent and the criminal underbelly that keeps the city from eating itself. There are nights when she feels the tug of magic in her skin, yanking at an Outsider’s mark that is not quite there. Summoning spells. Smell of familiar blood and metal and tobacco in her little cabin, though no one on this ship smokes. If she closes her eyes she can see down a long tunnel with Daud at the end, sitting at his desk, mark ablaze, cursing. Come back, dammit. Come back.
There are two glasses next to the whiskey bottle, not one, and there are Waverly Boyle’s clawed fingerprints over the glass; and there are too many years and miles and storms and songs from the ink-black lips of Lizzy Stride between them for the magic to work anyway.
The years turn. Billie has nothing against Waverly Boyle, not personally, nothing against her smile or her hips or whatever Daud finds in her when he presses her down over desk or into bed. The sour taste in her mouth is certainly not jealousy. It is disgust over the aristocratic lilt of the woman’s laugh, the velvet of her gloves, the uncalloused hands underneath, the eyes of her servants; it is the words she speaks in Daud’s ear and the plans she lays before him for him to walk like a tightrope. This is not the jealousy of women. This is the jealousy of pressing her childhood mud-smeared nose to pristine glass.
Billie Lurk changes her name, and keeps her hair short and unseemly, and tattoos her skin, and learns to move with the deck of a ship and uses her gifted powers for murder the way Daud intended. And the years turn and turn. And this is the way it is.
At least, until the night rips open with a storm that sets the sky ablaze with white and brings the sound of pealing bells on the north wind. It takes a week for them to make port and hear the news. Billie snatches the precious, precious paper from Lizzie’s hands, and transverses to the top of the rigging, and reads –
Burrows, devoured by rats of his own design.
Emily Kaldwin, empress
Daud, Royal Protector.
Waverly Boyle –
It has been at least six years since Billie left Dunwall, and two since she did not flinch when Lizzie blinked before her in the ruins of her sinking ship and held a blade to her throat but did not cut. She has grown used to not wearing a mask. To throwing her shoulders back, looking people in the face, knocking on her captain’s door and staring the madwoman in the eye and (still) never, ever flinching.
“Take me home.”