Chapter 254 — House Blood
The next hook was a spit of piles called Gray Salt, and we hit her before the spars could hear the whole sentence.
Isolde did not kiss gold this time. She drove the living hull across the white ship's bow and sheared the clean line Shen Yuelan needed for a sermon. The crack screamed. Men on Gray Salt's boom looked up and got a noise, not a name. Not yet. Vale went over in the mess of lines. Sael followed. I went because the thread yanked, and Elizabeth went because she had already chosen the hand.
Shen Yuelan met her at the rail.
No tea. No pin. Sleeve stiff with dried blood, mouth ready with the old name. She got half of it out.
Elizabeth did not use her eyes.
She caught the wrist that was dropping toward the crack and broke the motion with her weight. Shen Yuelan was house-trained and not soft. She drove a knee up. Elizabeth took it on the thigh and kept the hand off the gold. I put my palm on the seam while they fought and tried again to drink.
The mark bit.
It knew me. It did not want to come home. It wanted the blood it had already tasted, and the blood was on Shen Yuelan's hand, smeared fresh where Elizabeth's grip had split a knuckle. The note lunged up my arm, found no open door it liked, and jumped the inch between my fingers and her skin.
Shen Yuelan jerked.
The crack on the rib dulled. The brightness went into her forearm, a hairline of light under the flesh, there and gone, then there again when she breathed. She looked at her own arm the way she had looked at the pin. Not afraid enough.
"Oh," she said.
Elizabeth slammed the arm away from the rail before the light could crawl back into the hull. Red flared at the rim of her eyes and she killed it, jaw locked, because the gaze had fed this thing once and she would not feed it twice. Vale put a knife at Shen Yuelan's throat. Sael had the kneeling man on the deck and the other five thinking about God.
"Off the ship," Elizabeth said.
Shen Yuelan laughed once, short, and the light in her arm pulsed with it.
"You moved it," she said. "You did not kill it. A hull can be sunk. A witness with your name under her skin can walk into any boom you have left."
The Gray Salt crew had heard enough to be stupid. A man on the pile shouted the complaint. Another shouted to open. The note in Shen Yuelan's arm answered the open, not the complaint, and the nearest spar creaked like Low Mast's had. Isolde roared at us to get off before the living rib took a second brand.
We took her.
Not clean. She bit Vale. Elizabeth kept the marked arm twisted behind her back. I stayed off her skin after the jump, because the thread wanted to finish what it had started and finishing it on a deck full of ears would have written Gray Salt the way it had written the quay. Sael cut the bowline. The white hull, dull now, empty of the sermon, drifted into the piles and stuck there like a tool that had lost its edge.
On our deck Shen Yuelan knelt because Elizabeth made her, not because she had decided to.
The light under her skin had settled into a thin vein from wrist to elbow. When she spoke, the vein warmed.
"Low Mast opened," she said. "Gray Salt will open by noon if you leave that hull against their piles. And I will open the next one with my mouth, unless you cut the arm off and pray the name is only in the arm."
Elizabeth looked at the vein. Then at me.
"Can you take it out of her?"
"Not without opening."
"Then do not open." She shoved Shen Yuelan toward the mast and tied the marked wrist to iron herself, away from my hands, away from the rail. "She wanted a witness. She is the witness. She does not get a harbor, and she does not get a blade, until I know whether that line dies or spreads."
Gray Salt's boom was still shut. Barely. The stuck white hull knocked a pile, and the pile hummed. Isolde did not stay to explain. She put the living ship back into dirty water with a Phoenix daughter bound to our mast and a scorch on the rib and a coast that had already heard too much.
Shen Yuelan rested her head against the iron and watched Elizabeth with blood on her teeth and the old name held behind them like a knife she did not need to draw.
"You can break my hand," she said. "You already did. The paper is still in the house. The name is still in me. Run me to your city if you want. Your docks have children."
Elizabeth did not answer.
The vein pulsed once, in time with my chest, and the thread sat on her arm the way it had sat on the hull.
We had cut the sermon off the gold.
We had put it in a woman who knew exactly where to spend it.
...
Author's note: I released a new novel 'I Grant Perverted Systems'. A brief description is that the main character grants perverted systems to his mom, sisters, instructors, and women in general. They'd have to engage in perverted acts with him to receive rewards. Do check it out if you're interested and support its growth with powerstones.
Also, for those that aren't in the discord, a few days ago, I announced that I would be releasing 3 chapters daily for this novel starting from the first of next month.
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