Page 2 of Add To Hoard

The brig says nothing. The rain drums on the deck above. The Blaecwater pushes against the hull and the hull pushes back.

I have been watching the ‘Tenacious’ for three weeks. I know which dock workers watch this end of the harbor and when their shifts change. I know how much water is in the hold and how many days of provisions I could carry if I was careful about it. I know the harbor chain that closes the mouth of the channel is raised at midnight and lowered again at first light.

I am not sure, yet, what I know this for.

That is a lie. I know exactly what I know this for.

I take my hand off the hull and go back to work.

Mother Sevraine’s apothecary sits above the harbor on the hill where the buildings are old enough to have settled sideways into each other for warmth. The sign above the door is hand-painted, the letters slightly uneven, the kind of sign made by someone who learned their letters late and was proud enough of the fact to display them publicly. Inside, it smells of dried herbs and a medicinal sharpness I have never been able to name, and the walls are lined with jars whose labels I have memorized over years of sitting in the corner chair waiting for news I didn’t want.

Bren is in the back room. He is always in the back room now.

He is asleep when I arrive, which is both a mercy and a gutpunch — sleeping means the worst of the day is behind him, but it also means he is too tired to be awake. They are not the same thing. He is fifteen years old and thin in a way that has stopped being temporary and started being structural. The cough has been in his lungs for three years. The healers in Blackwake have run out of things to call it that don’t sound like a verdict.

I sit beside him for a while without waking him. Watch him breathe. It is shallow and careful, the breathing of a body that has learned to treat its own lungs as fragile things on loan.

Mother Sevraine finds me there.

She is a small woman, Sevraine, with weathered dark skin and silver-streaked hair wrapped in faded scarves, and sea-green eyes that see considerably more than most people expect. She has run this apothecary for thirty years and buried two husbands and a daughter, and she carries the particular settledness of a woman long past difficult news, who delivers it the same way she does everything else — cleanly, without decoration.

“The salt bark isn’t working anymore,” she says. She doesn’t sit. “I stretched it as long as I could.”

My jaw tightens. “What does that mean?”

“It means we’re past what I can do here.” Sevraine’s voice is quiet but doesn’t waver. “The remedies that could actually stop the damage, the deep-lung treatments, the restoration tonics, those come from the inland kingdoms. They cost what they cost because they work, and they work because there is nothing like them anywhere closer than three weeks’ travel by horse.” She pauses. “He has months, Neri. Not years. Months, if the cold comes hard this winter.”

The word settles into the room and stays there.

I look at my brother’s face, the soft lines of it, the way his mouth goes slack when he sleeps, still somehow looking like the seven-year-old who used to follow me around the dock pretending he was helping, and everything goes very still in the center of my chest.

“How much,” I say.

Sevraine tells me.

I don’t react. I have learned not to react to numbers, because reacting to them means acknowledging that they are real.

I acknowledge it anyway, in the part of myself I don’t show anyone.

I stay until Bren wakes, and I feed him the broth Sevraine has left warming on the small iron stove, and I listen to him talk about the book he has been reading — some collection of natural histories that Sevraine found in a box of donated goods, already falling apart at the spine, and I laugh at the right moments and ask questions and hold his hand when the coughing comes.

I leave when he falls asleep again. Not long. I pull the door shut carefully behind me and stand in the cold outside Sevraine’s apothecary with the rain coming down steadier now, thicker, and the harbor spread below me with its lights and its noise and the black water beyond.

I think about the number Sevraine gave me. My daily wage on the docks. I do the arithmetic I have been refusing to look at directly for months, and I look at it now.

It doesn’t get better when you look at it directly.

The drunks are at it early near the harbor end. Not unusual. What’s unusual is that they’re zagfer.

Dark elves in Blackwake are not common, the settlement is too poor, too grimy, too far beneath the kind of place where dark elf merchants and officials prefer to conduct their business, but occasionally a ship puts in carrying crew that doesn’t match the port, and occasionally those crew find their way to the harbor-end taverns with their superior bearing and their arrogance still on them even when they’re drunk, the particular achievement of a people who have decided they remain better than you under all conditions including unconsciousness.

There are two of them, leaning against the wall outside the Anchor and Rot with the unsteady certainty of men who have been drinking since the afternoon. One is tall with the characteristic silver hair that all the zagfer seem to have, and the other is laughing at a joke with his head thrown back, and I would have walked past them entirely if I hadn’t caught the word.

Bloodstorm.

I slow without stopping. Keep my eyes forward. Let myself drift close enough to the wall that I can hear them over the rain.

“—can’t be real,” the laughing one is saying. “No ship has ever come back.”