CHAPTER 30: MAGIC TRICK
They were in the air aboard The Sapphire Spirit only a few days later. Their crew matched their expected cargo in that it was a relatively tight one for this particular trip. Iric and Gabby had joined Elias along with two of their regular workers, but the late-summer voyage felt quieter than most, as if everyone was on their best behavior in the presence of their sixth passenger, whose name was recognizable even to those who had never met the woman before. Abigail Graystone scarcely made a fuss. Elias had offered to let her sleep in the great cabin, suggesting he bunk with the crew instead, but Abigail had first refused his offer out of what appeared to be a position of principle. By the next morning, she grudgingly accepted it.
Perhaps it was exhaustion that opened her up, or maybe it was the relief of better accommodation, but Elias and Abigail seemed to finally let their shoulders down around one another as he helped bring her bags into her new room. Bertrand was no longer here to be their cordial buffer.
“I should clarify an important point, “Elias said, setting down a leather trunk that seemed excessive for a week of travel, not that he would ever mention it. “This is actually Islet’s bed. The rest of us just rotate through. She may sleep beside your feet or on your feet, but her presence is rather non-negotiable, I’m afraid.”
“It is a price I’m willing to pay,” Abigail replied, scratching the chin of their cow-print cat, who was human-chest-level perched on the cabin’s long dining table. Islet was unaccustomed to the scratches of a woman with long nails—Briley and Gabby kept theirs practically short—and so this was, judging by her rumbling purrs and outstretched neck, a wondrously novel experience for the feline.
“Ask me again in a few days, but right now I am very much enjoying the small pleasures of peace and quiet,” Abigail said, maintaining eye contact with the cat. “There is something about being physically far from everything in one’s life that relieves a tension I didn’t realize was there. It’s not as if I never travel, but it is always with the same family members, carrying on with the same tired conversations. The scenery changes, but a strange land can be just a different view through a familiar window. This time is different. This time it’s just me.”
“Shall I give you some space?” Elias asked, backing up toward the door.
She looked at him. “I didn’t mean to imply—I’m happy to have your company, Elias. You are not… familiar.”
That, of course, was not by choice, or at least not by his choice.
“How is married life?” he inquired, figuring they might as well tear off that bandage.
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said.
“That sounds… fine.”
“Not quite as adventurous as the life of a globetrotting bachelor, I imagine.”
“Is that what you think my life has become?”
She shrugged. “You avoid me like a deadly plague, so I wouldn’t know what your life has become. Occasionally, Bertrand might mention something to Amara, who might mention something to me, but it really is none of my business what you’re up to.”
Most of what Elias heard about Abigail these days similarly came from his business partner, though Bertrand was hardly acting the role of spy. He and Amara were merely communicative people whose respective best friends had their own, much briefer history. Not that there had ever been anything between them, not truly. Maybe truly. Definitely not officially.
“Well, it’s nice to reconnect,” Elias said, willing his cheeks not to blush.
“As your client,” she added.
“That is how most connections are made, or remade, in my experience.”
“But not ours.” They were flying through a cloud that grayed out the windows of the great cabin. “So, what is it you and your crew usually do on these long flights?
“I work, mostly.” Elias leaned against the wall, making himself half-comfortable. “There are always contracts to write up, invoices to reconcile. Iric and Gabby ensure the crew remain orderly and the ship stays clean and functional. When Bertrand is here, he sometimes plays Sirens with them, and Briley inevitably tells him he shouldn’t bet relics with our employees. I recall you’re also fond of the game and no less skilled at it.”
“I brought a deck,” she admitted, “if you ever wish to play.”
“I cannot bluff like Bertrand, but I could take you up on that offer.”
“So long as you don’t cheat.”
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“Is that what you take me for?”
“I just recall your unusual penchant for winning competitions. Even since last we spoke, you and your company have ascended as so few do, now with your own seat in the House of Merchants. You’re practically one of us.”
“I’m hardly a rich man,” he countered. “We invest almost everything we earn into growing the business. Maybe that’s our secret—our cheat. Pretty sure I was wearing this same jacket when we were… spending time together.” He tugged the pockets of the navy coat in question, which he felt had weathered the seasons admirably, minus a single missing brass button.
“You were.” Abigail appeared certain of this detail. While normally a woman of dresses, today she wore tan breeches, black boots, and a compact coat more appropriate for the gusty conditions aboard an airship bound for the United North. Even in the heat of summer, higher altitudes could be quite cool. “Perhaps one of these days, you’ll let me in on the magic behind the trick.”
* * *
That day did not come immediately, though Elias felt Abigail was somehow peeling layers from him, that all the ones he’d added over these past three years would be lying on the floor before they landed in Saint Albus. He questioned whether he was similarly breaking through Abigail’s well-polished armor and thought, encouragingly, that perhaps he was. It was a dangerous notion: entertaining the fantasies he could not help but entertain. Were his two closest friends here—ah, but they were not. Elias was untethered, save for the line to his heart.
Time flew by too quickly, and soon they were soaring over the low-treed Katumala Territory, where years ago he had discovered a strange community and an even stranger woman named Mitra, whom he still owed an undetermined favor. Elias wondered if news of the Valshynarian falling apart had reached Mitra and assumed it most likely had. He recalled the airship they kept docked in the forest, their one connection to civilization for supplies and rumor alike. With his telescope, he searched for their village, for plumes of smoke, to no avail. They had found them in winter, but the weather today was too warm for frequent fires. And yet he thought he could almost feel a direction, if not see one.
“Looking for something?” Abigail asked him out on the bow.
Collapsing his brass instrument, Elias told her about their unintended detour the first time they flew over this forest, leaving out a few incriminating details. Once again, he got the impression that Abigail could detect he was holding something back. Her intuition seemed to be Mrs. Graystone’s supernatural power.
A heavy thunk sounded from the deck, offering Elias an escape route from Abigail’s inquiring gaze. “I wish you wouldn’t do that when we’re airborne,” he called down to Iric and Gabby.
Iric shrugged, hatchet in hand. Gabby mirrored his shrug in miniature fashion, beaming proudly at the axe she had successfully hurled into a wooden barrel, squarely in the center of a crudely painted bullseye.
“Ain’t no one running in front of us,” Gabby said.
“It’s just generally unnerving to have flying axes on an airship,” Elias explained.
“They are not flying,” Iric argued. “They are moving in a controlled line.”
“That’s still literally—it doesn’t matter. What if a new crewmember sees you and decides to throw his own axe in a less controlled line?”
“It is… a fair point,” Iric admitted with a heavy sigh. While the northerner was a frequent purveyor of everyday wisdom, he was never above admitting when he was wrong, though he’d be quick to remind his younger colleagues that humility was the true center of wisdom, and thus a valuable lesson was still imparted.
For her part, Abigail seemed simply entertained. She had mentioned she liked his crew more than the ones she was accustomed to, as Edric did not create a particularly inviting culture at The Graystone Company. She tried to change that, where she could.
“They’re luckier to have you than they’ll ever realize,” Elias said.
“Some of them realize.” She smiled her words. “Just not the ones I’m related to.”
* * *
He had almost made it. Elias had almost made it to Saint Albus without telling her everything. But with the Valshynar in tatters, he could not help but wonder whose secret he was even hiding anymore.
He did it over a game of Sirens, the endless tundra of the United North inching behind her through the paned windows of their great cabin.
“I cannot bluff like Bertrand,” Elias said again, “but I am entirely certain that your hand will beat mine.”
“Confident, are we?” Abigail smirked.
“It doesn’t take confidence when you can see the answer. When you can literally see the answer.”
This time, she scrunched her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“I think you do, or at least part of the way.”
She rested her cards face down on the table. “It has something to do with your new alliance with those former Valshynar, doesn’t it?” She had clearly already given this some thought. “The Serpent Moon Syndicate.”
“You’ve always been observant,” Elias said.
“It is hardly a subtle alliance,” Abigail replied.
“It’s… a lot to explain, but we have a few hours before we land in Saint Albus. And I don’t want to keep lying to you.”
After all, she had opened up to him over these past few days, though also not entirely. Openness had a single key, he had learned: if he wished to unlock whatever it was that she still hid from him, he would need to unlock his own uncomfortable secrets. While he possessed a limited view of the future, one magic trick he did not have tucked into the sleeve of his favorite jacket was the ability to transport himself back in time. Only his wild imagination could perform that miracle. Only in fantasy, through quill and ink and paper, could he envisage what might have been in a timeline in which he was honest with Abigail Graystone from the start. Elias had no idea, of course, and the truth probably would not have changed anything. But what he did know was that he still felt as he had that day when he first saw her at the Night Market, then again at Mr. Grimsby’s Solstice Eve party. When they had stumbled into one another in Azir’s Garden District. When they’d had their unofficial date in the quiet embrace of her favorite Hightown park. Though a hopeless feeling he now knew it was. Elias could discover a hundred shortcuts all across the Great Continent, but the way to a married Graystone, if such a thing could ever exist, was beyond the powers of an ascendant collector. And he did not want her that way anyway: through another lie.
She brushed a dark lock behind her ear as if to ensure she would not miss a single detail of what he might tell her. Her attentive silence was a page without words, waiting for him to start.
Elias placed his mediocre cards face up on the table, spreading them like a fortune teller, and smiled a relieved, somewhat excited smile. “Where do I begin?”
