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CHAPTER EIGHT

I t stood to reason that a port town as gleaming as the gold-stone, azure-roofed Bevhyre would have piss-thin ale. For once, being right didn’t fill Isak Sintali with a sense of satisfaction. Mostly it filled him with the watery taste of sad, artisan hops and grains that were trying too hard. When his sandwich arrived, it had a little Sainsan flag stuck through it to keep all the fillings inside. He was used to army rations even after months out of service, and the semi-edible food he’d fed himself with stolen money in Eosantha had seemed like a king’s feast. This? This was a saint’s feast. Minus the piss-thin ale.

He crammed the sandwich into his mouth and took a big bite as he scowled at the newspaper he’d liberated from a table across the pub. He had some coin from a job he did for a guy back in Eosantha, but he had to be frugal or it’d drain within a week. He’d already spent more than he’d like on a wagon through Venhaus to Port Crystellion and then a spot of damp wooden floor on a trout-smelling barge making its way across the Silver Sea into Sainsa.

As far as anyone at the port knew, he was a sailor born and bred in Venhaus. His features were different to a Venhausian, but he was dressed in the long, tailored style of their clothes with a row of gleaming buttons running across each shoulder and down his arms, and the fifty-something portmaster looked exhausted so he didn’t peer too closely at Isak’s finer features.

And now he was here, slumped in a finely carved chair by a window of gold and blue stained glass, wishing for ditches and murky doorways and gloomy, vaguely threatening alleyways. It was like being back in the perfect parts of Eosantha all over again. At least the fae here were too polite to stare. The humans, however, were content to meet the eyes of everyone and match them with a glare, but he avoided them. He could sense beastkind, at least one, which meant they could probably sense them. Isak wondered if they could sense the wrongness inside his blood, his bones, his soul.

“Fuck, I hope not,” he muttered, putting down the massive sandwich to flip open his pilfered newspaper. The front page, he’d learned in his two days here so far, were always printed with good news stories. The juicy stuff was inside.

In the week since the nightmare at the saints' circle, he’d watched the news closely. Viskae, his own saint, knew there would be others, that the three saints they saw in Venhaus weren’t the only ones. The saints' circle was still broken, still open. There’d been no indication of a new saint yet, but certainly signs of the others—storms, typhoons, whole farms wilting overnight, and a disease spreading through livestock. The Eversky’s and the Provider’s work. As for Enryr, the Hunchback Saint, that was harder to track. Information could corrupt; maybe that explained all the instability in Aether.

Isak had a much simpler explanation: Maia’s bitch queen aunt was to blame.

“Szellwyn’s gone,” he muttered to himself, swallowing a mouthful of piss. Sorry, ale. “Vassalian soldiers trapped Szellwyn’s forces between their cavalry and the mountains. Anyone who resisted was slaughtered.”

Just like the Crooked City on the border and Millszt, Viskae replied with heavy sombreness.

Yup. Ismene’s forces had rolled over them like a bull trampling ants. Isak was no tactician but even he could see she’d conquered the lower kingdom for access to the upper. And once she had that? Sainsa and V’haiv would be next.

Which was a little worrying since he was in Sainsa.

“Remind me why the fuck I came here again,” he muttered, quietly enough that people wouldn’t think he was a completely nutjob for talking to himself. He shoved another bite of sandwich into his mouth. The combination of fresh seafood, salty sea leaf, and lemon flower shouldn’t have worked. It was divine, and that pissed Isak off. He wanted to go home instead of traipsing across Sainsa, but he had no home. He was an indentured slave who became a soldier against his will. There was no home to go back to.

Because, Viskae said with heavy exasperation, probably because she’d answered this exact question sixty times already, your brother, your mate, and their friends—the saints reincarnated, upon whom the entire Saintlands’ fate rests—are at the mercy of the dark ones. If they aren’t freed, everything you love about this realm will blacken. Everything you’ve ever known will fall. It will be a land of hollow, screaming suffering, and there will be no pints of ale in that future.

“Solid reasoning,” he admitted. Even crappy alcohol was alcohol. And fuck did he need something to drink when he read the rest of the paper. It wasn’t just Szellwyn; with the exception of the fishing town Marszton, the entirety of Lower Aether was under control of the Vassalian army or their elite teams. Fucking Foxes. Add to that the fact a good quarter of Venhaus was in smoking ruins… would anything be left standing?

No, Viskae answered.

“That wasn’t a question for you,” he muttered.

I don’t give a shit. Nothing will be left. Finish your food and find passage to Saintsgarde. Something pulls me there; information awaits you in the capital.

Great. Information. Just what he needed to fight three true, invincible saints. “What about an army? A mystical weapon? Or that box my superiors were so obsessed with?”

Yes, yes, all of that.

Now she was bullshitting him. Isak sighed and finished his sandwich, but it turned sour in his stomach when he turned the page and saw a current map of the continent.

Vassal-controlled land had been rendered in red, as rich and vibrant as blood. It had bled across the entire lower half of the Saintlands, all the way to the mountains. They were already moving up the Aether kingdoms and only the top third of Venhaus remained, the port he’d left just days ago surviving but barely —the red line was too close for comfort.

Isak sat back in his chair, rubbing a hand over his bristly jaw. “Shit.”

He’d known it was bad, knew saints making monsters and sacrificing hundreds of people could not be good, but seeing it in vibrant, damning colour was… terrifying. It wasn’t really Vassal who conquered these kingdoms; it was the saints.

The dark ones, Viskae agreed.

Yllevia had survived, that haven of artists and poets near the mountains. But how long until the creatures devoured it? How long until the saints turned it to ash?

Isak would have been dead if Viskae hadn’t insisted he go to Sainsa. “Shit. Is this why you made me leave?”

Viskae’s voice was unsettled, quiet. No. I didn’t see this progressing so rapidly.

Isak dragged a hand through his hair. It needed a cut, or a wash, but he’d been travelling nonstop to reach Sainsa this quickly, and he didn’t have the nerve to ignore Viskae’s advice to continue to the capital. Maybe she hadn’t known this was happening, but her intuition had saved him. It would have been one hell of a mistake for him to be killed when Viskae was reborn inside him, but for the saint of mistakes and redemption he wouldn’t have been surprised.

Isak forced himself to read the rest of the paper, finishing his food and ordering a second watery pint as he filled his mind with tensions, war, emergency meetings, coalitions, and stories of the displaced who’d fled those places Ismene now occupied. He felt sick by the time he was done reading and always came back to that map. He couldn’t help the way his eyes lingered on one town—Eosantha.

It hadn’t been home, he hadn’t been there nearly long enough, but Isak had felt safe for a little while. He wondered how many people he’d drank with, laughed with, and regaled with stories had survived. Wondered if they were all dead.

In his moments of weakness, he wondered about his brother, and about Maia. What were the dark saints doing to them this very moment? Were they given the same agonising treatment he’d been? Isak swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and grabbed his stick where he’d propped it against the chair.

“Better be going then,” he said under his breath, ignoring his exhaustion and the tremor in his leg. He was free, alive, and not enduring torture. So he would keep going until he found someone to help.

What happened to not being a hero? Viskae asked, curious more than snarky.

“I’m here now,” he muttered as he tucked the paper into a well-worn bag he won off someone in a game of cards. He wound his way to the stained glass door, a weight on his shoulders. “I might as well do something productive.”

And he couldn’t stop thinking about what Maia said. When whatever is leaking into this world comes for us? Comes for Jaro? It's on you, Isak Sintali.

If he’d been on the island with them, would they be free? Or would he be locked up with them? Back in the same nightmare where he was turned into the fucked up thing he was now.

On the street, Isak took a moment to fill his lungs with sharp sea air, letting it clear his head. He had no plan, only a city, a direction. What the fuck was he going to do?

Walk, Viskae suggested.

So Isak walked.