CHAPTER FOUR

Thanos knew he should have been watching the horizon, but right then, all he could do was watch Ceres with a mixture of pride, love, and amazement. She stood at the prow of their small boat, her hand touching the water as they headed from the harbor into open water. Around them, the air continued to shimmer, the haze that marked their invisibility seeming to twist the light that passed through it.

One day, Thanos knew, he would marry her.

“I think that’s enough,” Thanos said to her softly. He could see the strain on her face from it. The power was obviously taking its toll.

“Just… a little… farther.”

Thanos laid a hand on her shoulder. Somewhere behind him, he heard Jeva gasp, as if the Bone Folk woman expected him to be flung back by the power. Thanos knew Ceres would never do that to him though.

“We’re clear,” he said. “There’s nobody behind us.”

He saw Ceres look around in obvious surprise as she saw the deeper water they were now rowing across. Had it taken that much concentration to hold the power in place? Either way, there was no one behind them now, just empty ocean.

Ceres lifted her hand from the water, staggering slightly. Thanos caught her, holding her up. After everything she’d been through, he was amazed that she’d managed to show this much strength. He wanted to be there for her then. Not just some of the time, but always.

“I’m all right,” Ceres said.

“You’re more than that,” Thanos assured her. “You’re amazing.”

More amazing than he could have believed. It wasn’t just that Ceres was beautiful and clever and strong. It wasn’t just that she was powerful, or that she seemed to put the good of others ahead of her own so consistently. It was all those things, but there was also something special beyond that.

She was the woman he loved, and after what had happened in the city, she was the only woman he loved. Thanos found himself thinking about what that meant. They could be together now. They would be together.

She looked up at him then, and she reached up to kiss him. It was a soft, gentle moment, full of tenderness. Thanos found himself wishing that it could fill the whole world, and that there was nothing else they had to deal with.

“You chose me,” Ceres said, touching his face as they pulled back.

“I will always choose you,” Thanos said. “I will always be there for you too.”

Ceres smiled at that, but Thanos could see the note of uncertainty there in her expression too. He couldn’t blame her for that, but at the same time he wished it weren’t there. He wished that he could chase that away, leaving everything all right between them. He’d been on the verge of asking her for more then, but he knew when not to press things.

“I choose you too,” Ceres assured him, but at the same time she pulled back. “I should go catch up with my brother and my father.”

She went over to where Berin stood with Sartes and Leyana. A family, all looking happy together. A part of Thanos wished that he could simply go there to be a part of it. He wanted to be a part of Ceres’s life, and he suspected that she wanted him to be too, but Thanos knew it would take time to heal things between them.

Because of that, he didn’t rush over to her. Instead, Thanos stood considering the rest of the boat’s inhabitants. For such a small boat, there were a lot. The three combatlords Ceres had saved were doing most of the rowing, although now that they were clear of the harbor, they would be able to get the boat’s small sail up. Akila lay to one side, a conscript Sartes had freed keeping pressure on the wound.

Jeva was coming toward him.

“You’re an idiot if you’re going to let her walk away,” Jeva said.

“An idiot?” Thanos countered. “Is that any way to thank someone who just saved you?”

He saw the Bone Folk woman shrug. “You’re an idiot for doing that too. Risking yourself to help another is stupid.”

Thanos cocked his head to one side. He wasn’t sure that he would ever understand her. Then again, he thought with a glance across to Ceres, that was something that applied to more than one person.

“Risking yourself is what you do for friends,” Thanos said.

Jeva shook her head. “I wouldn’t have put myself in danger for you. If it is your time to join with the spirits of your ancestors, it is your time. It is even an honor.”

Thanos wasn’t sure what to make of that. Was she serious? If so, it seemed a little ungrateful given the risk he and Ceres had taken in order to save her.

“If I’d known it was such an honor to be a figurehead for one of the First Stone’s ships, I would have left you to it,” Thanos said.

Jeva looked at him with a slight frown. It seemed to be her turn to try to work out if he was serious or not.

“You’re joking,” she said, “but you should have left me. I told you, only a fool risks his life for others.”

It was too harsh a philosophy for Thanos.

“Well,” he said. “I’m glad you’re alive, at least.”

Jeva seemed to think for a moment or two. “I’m glad too. Which is strange. The dead will be displeased with me. Perhaps I have more to do. I will follow you until I find out what.”

She said it evenly, as though it was already a settled thing in which Thanos got no say. He wondered what it must be like, walking through the world with the certainty that the dead were in charge.

“Isn’t it strange?” he asked her.

“What is strange?” Jeva replied.

“Living your life assuming that the dead make all the decisions.”

She shook her head. “Not all of them. But they know more than we do. There are more of them than us. When they speak, we should listen. Look at you.”

That made Thanos frown. He wasn’t one of the Bone Folk, to be ordered about by their speakers of the dead.

“Me?”

“Would you be in the circumstances you are if it weren’t for decisions your parents and your parents’ parents made?” Jeva asked. “You are a prince. Your whole power rests on the dead.”

She had a point, but Thanos wasn’t sure that it was the same thing.

“I’ll be deciding what to do next for the living, not the dead,” he said.

Jeva laughed as though it was a particularly fine joke, then narrowed her eyes slightly. “Oh, you’re serious. We have people who say that too. Mostly, they are madmen. But then, this is a world for the mad, so who am I to judge? Where will we go next?”

Thanos didn’t have an answer for her when it came to that.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “My father told me where I might find out about my real mother, then the former queen told me that she was somewhere else.”

“Well then,” Jeva said. “We should go. Such news from the dead should not be ignored. Or we could return to the lands of my people. They would welcome us with the news of what happened to our fleet.”

She didn’t seem daunted by the prospect of reporting so many deaths to her people. She also seemed to be looking over at Ceres every so often, glancing at her with obvious awe.

“She is everything you said she would be. Whatever stands between you, solve it.”

She made it sound so simple and direct, as if it were as simple as saying it. Thanos doubted that things were ever that easy.

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder,” she said.

Thanos wanted to. He wanted to go to Ceres and declare his love. More than that, he wanted to ask her to be his. It seemed as though they’d been waiting forever for that to happen.

She waved him away. “Go, go to her.”

Thanos wasn’t sure about being dismissed like that, but he had to admit that Jeva had the right idea when it came to going after Ceres. He went over to her and the others, finding her looking more serious than he’d expected.

Her father turned, clasping Thanos’s hand.

“It’s good to see you again, boy,” he said. “If you hadn’t come, things might have been difficult.”

“You’d have found a way,” Thanos guessed.

“Now, we need to find our way,” Berin replied. “It seems everyone here wants to go somewhere different.”

Thanos saw Ceres nod at that.

“The combatlords think we should go out to the free wastes to become mercenaries,” she said. “Sartes is talking about slipping into the countryside around the Empire. I thought about maybe going back to the Isle of Mists.”

“Jeva was talking about going back to her people,” Thanos said.

“And you?” Ceres asked.

He thought about telling her about the lands of the cloud mountains, about his missing mother, and the chance to find her. He thought of living anywhere, anywhere with Ceres. But then he looked over to Akila.

“I’ll go wherever you go,” he said, “but I don’t think Akila will survive a long journey.”

“I don’t either,” Ceres said.

Thanos knew her well enough to know that she’d already thought of somewhere to go. Thanos was surprised that she hadn’t already taken charge. He could guess why, though. The last time she’d been in charge, she’d lost Delos, first to Stephania, and then to the invaders.

“It’s all right,” Thanos said, reaching out to touch her arm. “I trust you. Wherever you decide, I’ll follow.”

He guessed that he wouldn’t be the only one. Ceres’s family would go with her, while the combatlords had sworn to follow her, whatever they were saying about running off to seek adventure elsewhere. As for Jeva… well, Thanos didn’t claim to know the woman well enough to know what she would do, but they could always drop her off somewhere, if she wanted.

“We can’t catch up to the smuggling boat that brought you to Delos,” Ceres said. “Even if we knew where it was, this small boat won’t move as fast as it can. And if we try to go too far… I think Akila won’t make it.”

Thanos nodded. He’d seen the wound that the First Stone had inflicted on their friend. Akila had survived as much through willpower as anything else, but he needed a real healer, and soon.

“Where then?” Thanos asked.

Ceres looked at him, then at the others. She still seemed almost frightened about saying what she needed to say.

“There’s only one place,” Ceres said. She raised her voice to a level where the whole ship could hear. “We need to get to Haylon.”

Her father and her brother immediately started to shake their heads. Even some of the combatlords didn’t look happy.

“Haylon won’t be safe,” Berin said. “Now that Delos has fallen, it will be a target.”

“Then we need to help them to defend,” Ceres said. “Maybe there won’t be people trying to take it out from under us while we do it this time.”

That was a good point. Delos had fallen for a lot of reasons: the sheer size of Felldust’s fleet, the people who hadn’t stayed to fight, the lack of stability as Stephania conducted her coup. Maybe things would be different on Haylon.

“It doesn’t have its fleet,” Thanos pointed out. “I persuaded most of them to help Delos.”

He felt a wave of guilt over that. If he hadn’t talked Akila into helping, a lot of good people wouldn’t be dead, and Haylon would have the means to defend itself. His friend wouldn’t be lying wounded on the deck of their boat, waiting for assistance.

“We… chose to come,” Akila managed from where he lay.

“And if they don’t have a fleet, it’s all the more reason to try to help them,” Ceres said. “All of you, think, it’s the only friendly place nearby. It held off the Empire when it was strong enough that Felldust didn’t dare to attack. It needs our help. So does Akila. We’re going to Haylon.”

Thanos couldn’t argue with any of that. More than that, he could see the others coming around to it. Ceres had always had the ability to do that. It had been her name, not his, that had brought the Bone Folk. It had been she who had been able to persuade Lord West’s men, and the rebellion. She impressed him more and more every time she did it.

It was enough that Thanos would follow wherever she wanted to go, to Haylon or beyond. He could put the attempt to find his parentage on hold for now. Ceres was what mattered; Ceres, and dealing with the damage that Felldust would do if they spread out beyond Delos. He’d heard it on the docks in Port Leyward: this wasn’t going to be a quick raid.

“There’s a problem if we want to go to Haylon,” Sartes pointed out. “To get there, we would have to go through Felldust’s fleet. That’s the direction they were coming from, right? And I don’t think they’re all sitting in Delos’s harbor.”

“They aren’t,” Thanos agreed, thinking back to what he’d seen in Felldust. There had been whole flotillas of ships that hadn’t set off for the Empire yet; the ships of the other Stones had sat waiting to see what would happen, or been there gathering supplies so that they could join in the process of raiding.

They would be a real threat if their small boat tried to sail to Haylon by the direct route. It would simply be a matter of luck whether they met with foes on the way, and Thanos wasn’t sure whether Ceres would be able to pull off her disappearing trick for them again.

“We’ll have to go around,” he said. “We skirt the coast until we’re well clear of any route they might take, then come around to Haylon from its far side.”

He could see that the others weren’t happy about that thought, and Thanos guessed that it wasn’t just because of the extra time involved. He knew what that route meant.

Jeva was the one to say it.

“Taking that route would bring us through the Passage of Monsters,” she said. “It might be better to take our chances with Felldust.”

Thanos shook his head. “They’ll hunt us down if they see us. At least this way, we have a chance of going undetected.”

“We have a chance of getting eaten too,” the Bone Folk woman pointed out.

Thanos shrugged. There were no better options that he could see. There was no time to go anywhere else, and no better way through. They could risk this, or sit there until Akila died, and Thanos wouldn’t abandon his friend like that.

Ceres seemed to feel the same way.

“The Passage of Monsters it is. Let’s get the sail up!”