Page 50 of Fate of the Argosi

I kissed her.

Arissa, after only the briefest hesitation and with the same rash, headstrong, death-or-glory resolve with which she does everything, kissed me back.

Was it real, that kiss? Her lips pressed against mine, so fierce and firm, our mouths moving together, searching breathlessly for a rhythm that might signify more than just the impending loss we were both trying to forestall. Our hands met, fingers intertwining only briefly before coming apart so they could travel along the other’s back and neck and thread into the tangles of each other’s hair. The intensity was there, and the thrill, but was it real? Were the two of us giving in to wild abandon, or just clinging together in the dark, a pair of lost girls terrified of being abandoned?

Don’t know. Couldn’t say. My arta precis’s pretty darned good, but it ain’tthatgood. I broke it off first, knowing Arissa wouldn’t because doing so might mean the kiss wasn’t real.

‘Come with me,’ I said, breathless but determined to get the words out before she could stop me. ‘Sar’ephir says the journey through the shadowblack will only take five, maybe six days. Add three weeks to make sure the island’s safe and help the Mahdek get settled, then we come back. After that, we go anywhere you want to go. Find every unscrupulous merchant and corrupt king and we rob ’em blind. We’ll be the most famous thieves the continent’s ever seen. Courtly minstrels will write songs about us, and if they don’t, screw ’em, we’ll write the songs ourselves.’ I kissed her again, then pressed my forehead against hers and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see what was waiting in hers. ‘Come with me, Arissa.’

It was just the sound of us breathing for a while. Then she laughed.

It wasn’t a cruel thing, but she didn’t hold any of it back. Laughing’s what Arissa does when facing the inevitable calamities brought on by her own choices. ‘You, a thief?’ Her forehead still rested against mine, the fingers of her left hand trailing down my shoulder while her right picked my pockets. She was too skilled for me to feel it happening; it’s just that any time I can’t see both her hands, I know she’s stealingsomething. ‘You’ve never been a proper thief, Rat Girl.’

‘I was good enough to be your partner in our days with the Black Galleon gang.’

Her forehead rolled left then right against mine. ‘Afraid not. Even back then, before you became an Argosi, you weren’t a proper thief. You’re a gambler, Ferius. You play your cards or roll your dice because that’s your way of defying fate. When your hand comes up short or you roll snake eyes, you honour the wager because a proper gambler always pays her debts. Me, I’m a thief by nature, not circumstance. You know what makes a proper thief?’

‘Loose morals and a complete lack of respect for other people’s property?’

I could feel the skin on her forehead tightening when she smiled. ‘The deep spiritual conviction that I don’t owe the world a damned thing.’

Arissa stepped back, then knelt down and gathered up my scattered disharmony cards while I watched. After she was done, she stood up again and riffled the deck as if seeing the cards properly for the first time. ‘For a professional gambler, you sure do lose a lot of bets, you know that?’

There was a line I was meant to say then, one as inevitable to this moment as the curtain coming down at the end of a play. ‘It’s not gambling if there’s no risk,’ a better actor than myself would’ve recited, ‘and some debts, well, paying them makes your life richer.’

A decent line. I just couldn’t get the words out.

Arissa handed me the cards, then squeezed herself into the passageway beyond the cameo. ‘Listen, when this nonsense with spellships and magic islands and three-hundred-year-old wars is over, assuming you make it back to the continent alive, look me up, all right?’

A knock at the door and Ala’tris’s soft voice told me that preparations were almost done, and my time with Arissa – or Arelisa Talédra, Contessa of who-the-hells-knew-where – was almost gone.

‘It’s a big continent,’ I said, coming to peer through the opening in the wall. It was so dark on the other side, she was barely more than an outline among the shadows.

‘How’d you find me last time?’

A smile came unexpectedly to my lips with the memories of those six frustrating months bribing lawmen and lawyers in three countries, following all those rumours of unsolved burglaries and outrageous heists. ‘Easy,’ I replied. ‘I followed a trail of trouble. Led me right to you.’

Arissa appeared to give that considerable thought. ‘Well, I hate being predictable, but –’ she shot me a grin so big I could make it out even in the darkness – ‘I’ve got a feeling that might just work a second time too.’

I never heard her leave, only saw that the shadows had somehow darkened and a candle flame inside my chest, small but bright, had been extinguished. I closed the cameo just before the door opened and Ala’tris entered. The two guards outside were gone, so I guess Stoika had gotten what she’d wanted out of the Jan’Tep and no longer needed to keep me from interfering.

‘I’m sorry to disturb your contemplations,’ Ala’tris said with her customary diplomacy, ‘but the preparations are almost done and Sar’ephir says now is the best time for our departure.’

Not even three days, I thought, a finger tracing the elaborate design engraved into the cameo.Nobody but the Mahdek could uproot their lives so quickly.

My arta loquit picked up a trace of strain in Ala’tris’s tone. There was a heaviness in her breathing. I knew even before I saw the paleness in her features and redness around her eyes what had happened. ‘They roughed you up, didn’t they? Colfax and his former marshals?’

She shook her head, and smiled in that way graceful people do when they’re hiding a deep hurt. ‘The interrogations were . . . as gentle as the situation allowed. Stoika needed to assuage the concerns of the other Mahdek elders. Your people have a remarkable talent for asking the same questions over and over again, and Lucallo Colfax finds great virtue in denying sleep to a suspect.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It shouldn’t be this way.’

Ala’tris stared at me a moment, and I had that uncomfortable sensation when someone who’s just gone through hell is feeling sorry for you.

She walked over to the large window where Chedran had stood before, curling a finger to beckon me to join her. The sun was setting, but there was still enough light for me to look down the slope of the orchards and past the walls of the estate to where the spellship now floated upon an ocean that hadn’t existed when we’d arrived. Waves of pure shimmering onyx rose and fell, the ship bobbing up and down among them, anchored by whatever magic Sar’ephir had used to summon that shadowblack sea.

Ala’tris placed her hand on my shoulder as she pointed. ‘You and I, Ferius, are about to board that galleon and sail through realms never before visited by any of our ancestors. I don’t pretend to fully understand the Argosi ways, but tell me, sister, are we not on the precipice of a magnificent adventure, you and I?’

I’ve known since I was a little girl that the world can be a desert so parched it’ll drink up your spirit soon as you set foot upon the sand. When I became an Argosi I learned to stop fearing that desert, because no matter how dry and empty it gets, if you look hard enough, you’ll always find something unexpected blooming atop the next dune.

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