Cloudy Climes and Starless Skies
Author: Alexis Hall
Date: 2014-10-30T08:00:00+00:00
Description: My dearest Dil, I fear our lifestyle does not lend itself well to the marking of dates or rites of passage, but I cherish the night on which I first told you my story. Of my birth in Canton and my life in England, and how—at last—I escaped from it to the skies. Of my father's attempts to make me his, and my struggle to make myself my own. Of airship and auroras, the flying pirate city of Liberty, and how I became who I am. I've tried to write it all down for you as best I can, so you may share it with me again whenever you wish. Happy anniversary. Love forever, BK

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cloudy Climes and Starless Skies (A Prosperity Story)

Copyright © 2015 by Alexis Hall

Cover art: Simoné, http://www.dreamarian.com

Editor: Sarah Frantz

Layout: L.C. Chase, http://lcchase.com/design.htm

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ISBN: 978-1-62649-225-7

First edition

January, 2015

Also available in paperback as part of Liberty & Other Stories:

ISBN: 978-1-62649-230-1

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My dearest Dil,

I fear our lifestyle does not lend itself well to the marking of dates or rites of passage, but I cherish the night on which I first told you my story. Of my birth in Canton and my life in England, and how—at last—I escaped from it to the skies. Of my father’s attempts to make me his, and my struggle to make myself my own. Of airship and auroras, the flying pirate city of Liberty, and how I became who I am.

I’ve tried to write it all down for you as best I can, so you may share it with me again whenever you wish.

Happy anniversary.

Love forever,

BK

To L, and all the wild horses

About Cloudy Climes and Starless Skies

Prologue

Chapter the First

Chapter the Second

Chapter the Third

Epilogue

Dear Reader

Also by Alexis Hall

About the Author

Enjoy this Book?

When Shadowless makes slip in Temperance, Byron Kae searches for a present for Dil. They don’t like being ashore—everyone stares, and skytowns feel enclosed with their jumble of platforms and people—but at least they have no need for care on the narrow beams and swaying ladders. Byron Kae can’t remember ever being afraid of falling, even when they had another name, before they became who they are now. They could fly, if they wanted, but they’re already wary of the way people look at them. The way Dil had once, though he doesn’t any more. Hasn’t for a long time.

Dil can’t hide anything. Byron Kae used to wonder how he ever made much of a cardsharp until they saw him take four airmen for everything at Calumny. They had expected cold eyes and composure, like everyone else around the table, but Dil had laughed and glittered, and lied with his whole face. And, afterwards, they’d all had to run. Once they were flying, sky-safe and far beyond pursuit, Dil had put his arms around Shadowless’s neck, breathless with his own wickedness, and Byron Kae had felt the heat of him, and his fast-beating heart.

Sometimes, oh just sometimes, on hot days, they fly even higher, where the air is thin and the aether is close, and the sun drenches Shadowless in sticky gold . . . and Dil takes his shirt off. He’s so very different from the wan, hungry-eyed boy they’d gathered bleeding from the ground in Prosperity. The boy Byron Kae had nearly lost to fever, to Ruben Crowe, to a falling world. He’s a little bit piratical now, with his longer braids, and the wiry muscles that pull and shift beneath his smooth, dark skin, but when he smiles his shiny, dimple-bracketed smile, he’s all Dil. His feet are always light upon Shadowless, and Byron Kae tastes the heavy sweetness of his sweat where it falls sometimes upon the deck.

Jane, of course, always knows exactly what they’re up to, emerging dishevelled and disgruntled from her cabin to put a stop to it with a few sharp words. Makes them blush. Like the time she glared through a haze of opium smoke, and told them, “When I desire someone, I fuck them. It makes life so much simpler.”

But Byron Kae can’t see how it would make anything simple at all.

It’s been turbulent up in the blue since Prosperity fell. The kraken are restless, the airnavy patrols the skyways, and the skytowns are subject to increasing scrutiny from the authorities below. What has always been a transient life now feels fragile in other ways, and even basic resources are scarce. Books are almost impossible to find. As a commodity, they fall between the cracks of precious and worthless, and wanting them becomes its own trap. Some men would call this weakness. Certainly the pedlars, salesmen, and storekeepers must, for they always drive a hard bargain, and Byron Kae isn’t very good at haggling. Dil would probably be horrified if he ever found out the cost of his ragged, little library, but Byron Kae puts no price on his pleasure.

They dread the day they run out of books, or Dil’s interest wanes. The end of starlit evenings, full of words and Dil’s laughing. He likes mysteries and romances best, speculating endlessly—Jane would say interminably—about what he thinks is going to happen next and which characters are going to get together, as if he has, at last, discovered all the friends his life has lacked. He wept for hours over the injustice of Vanity Fair, and “princock swells what were too far up their own arses to see folk is just trying to get on in the world and shouldn’t be subject to arbitrary moral punishment.” That last bit was all Ruben. It made Byron Kae miss his friend and hurt a little at the same time.

The only book in Temperance is Hard Times, and Dil is going to hate it.

But Byron Kae buys it anyway in exchange for one of the opals strung through their hair. It’s a sad-looking, water-damaged volume, bound in olive-green cloth, with the original purchase price of five shillings rather mockingly inscribed in gilt upon the spine.

They settle down with it that evening, and make it to chapter three before Dil starts bristling.

“Coketown,” he scoffs. “Cos that ain’t obviously supposed to be Gaslight.”

Byron Kae once made the mistake of telling him that Dickens had spent three months working at a blacking factory at the age of twelve, thus cementing him in Dil’s estimation as “a whiny prick what don’t know what he’s talking about. Three months, my arse.”

It doesn’t take much longer before the misery of it all gradgrinds them both down, and they give up.

“’Tis like he don’t see ’em as people at all.” Dil has his head in Byron Kae’s lap, spilling braids and smiles and careless heat. “Just cogs in his Great Social Message or what ’ave ye.”

Byron Kae wants to touch him. Always, but particularly now, at the edge of day, on the cusp of night, in this time that is theirs. They imagine him sun gilded and star limned, a burnished man, and feel the curve of his spine as he shifts on the pillows he has strewn across the deck.

“Perhaps that’s the intention?” they suggest.

“Yeah, but it don’t make him no better than what he’s talking about. That ain’t no reformer zeal. ’Tis hypocrisy, is what.”

It’s a fair point. “I’m sorry, Dil. I didn’t . . . There wasn’t—”

He startles and pulls away, and the loss of him stirs the sails, and ripples through the rigging. “I didn’t mean nowt.” Cross-legged now, and facing Byron Kae, he looks at them, stricken. “’Tis still a princely gift.”

“There’s little value in an unread book.”

Dil reaches out and takes Hard Times from their unresisting hands. “Before you, there was only ever unread books.”

Byron Kae isn’t sure what to say. Dil sounds oddly serious, and they’re mortifyingly distracted by the way the light gleams on his eyelashes. Dil is not unfamiliar with his assets, nor ashamed to use them, but right now there are no flutters, no dimples, just Dil’s steady gaze.

“Thing is,” he goes on, “these ain’t the stories I want no more.”

Oh.

“Fuck me sideways with a—” Dil scrabbles against the deck, and just about manages to avoid being thrown into the mast. “Is that krakens?”

“N-no. Just . . . aetherflow.” They blush. The wind dies, and Shadowless calms. But Byron Kae’s heart still beats too hard. “I understand. We . . . we’ve read a lot of books and—”

“It ain’t about the books,” Dil cuts them off abruptly, and then tugs a bit sheepishly at a braid. He has a way of concealing uncertainty behind boldness that Byron Kae rather admires. He acts when most would hesitate, laughs when others would not, and takes, in general, too many chances. He goes on more gently, “Thing is, I want a different story. I want yours.”

Byron Kae feels his attention like heat. Like a touch. It fills them with fear and a kind of sweet, sharp hope that is—if anything—just as painful. “Mine?”

“Aye.”

They look at their hands, at the rainbows on the tips of their fingers, and feel the pulse of aether beneath their skin. That’s their story. “I . . . I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“Popular opinion suggests, beginning’s a good place.”

That makes them smile, and they don’t even try to hide it. Dil makes it easy to smile. “I thought you hated all that, um, nonsense about ‘what your father was called and where you was squeezed yowling out your mother.’”

He’s so proud of his words, and grins to hear them coming back to him. “Only when I ain’t got reason to give a fuck.”

“Well, I’m honoured to be worthy of your . . . fucks.”

They just about manage to say it without blushing, and it’s worth it to hear Dil laugh. “I meant,” he says, “with books and shit. Nowt more depressing than settling in for six hundred pages and then stagging straightwise the hero’s four years old or sommat, and ain’t going to do anything interesting for ages.”

“I suppose some readers might say it helps them really get to know a character.”

“Mebbe. But life—” Dil glitters wickedly “—is lived in media res.”

His mouth forms the Latin a little too carefully. Byron Kae hears Ruben. “Then what does my past matter?” they ask.

“It don’t matter a damn if you don’t want to tell me. But I kinda want to know stuff about you.” Dil sounds so unexpectedly solemn, so unexpectedly uncertain, before he continues with characteristic avarice, “All the stuff.”

Byron Kae hides their smile this time so Dil doesn’t think he’s being laughed at. But, truthfully, they like to be the subject of his wanting. “Of course I want to tell you. I’ll tell you anything.”

“’Tis sorta interesting to me sometimes cos I got no clue about myself that way.” He settles back into Byron Kae’s lap, stretching an arm into the last of the sunlight so that it glides over his skin, honey-gold and mellow. “Parent’s could’ve been anybugger. Though I got some inkling one or both ’em weren’t perhaps entirely white.”

Byron Kae traces a fingertip down Dil’s forearm, a pale shadow, chasing the sun. They tremble a little with the pleasure and the presumption of it, but Dil just closes his eyes and makes a deep, rough sound at the back of his throat. The truth is, Dil is full of hungers. Greedy for words and skin and the open sky. They imagine too easily how he might respond to other touches. The way he might move, the things he might say. His sly, graceful hands knowing all the secrets of Byron Kae’s body.

“My father,” they tell him, “is Lord Wolfram.”

A blade-swift silence.

Then, “Ooh lah-di-dah.” Dil’s contempt for what he calls the nib folk is instinctive, but at the same time tinged by a kind of hopeless envy. Byron Kae finds it comforting to wonder sometimes whether Dil was truly in love with Ruben, or simply with the kind of life that would create someone like him.

“It’s a very minor title. He’s a navy man. An admiral now.”

“So, you’re a . . . a—” Dil’s eyes open, and there’s hurt gleaming in the darkness of them “—lord or . . . lady or what ’ave ye? This . . . flying about, then, ’tis just a hobby?”

“No.” Too sharp. Too certain. Heat and aether rushes through them. “This is who I am.”

“You ain’t no Wolfram?”

“That will never be my name. I’m not . . . not legitimate.” Such a strange word to wear. “I’m just me.”

Dil smiles up at them. “Ain’t no ‘just’ about it. But how you’d figure Lord Wossname for your dad? Being a by-blow and all.”

“I was politically embarrassing.” Byron Kae wonders how to explain. “And Lord Wolfram always claims what he believes to be his. Whether he values it or not.”

“Reckon I know the type. Dice roll any kinder for your mam?”

“I don’t know. She passed away when I was very young. I don’t . . . I don’t remember her at all.”

Those early years, before their mother died and after, are all in fragments. Too many different people and too many different places. Too little understanding. All muddled in a sensory haze: the scent of blood and chrysanthemum tea, red-sailed ships with watching eyes, a square white house on a hill, not like the other houses, a garden with silver water and golden fish, the sun slipping shadowless across a different sky.

“Well,” offers Dil cheerfully, “leastways you ain’t got nowt to miss.”

They try to smile, not knowing what to say.

“How’d she die?”

Touch is suddenly the wrong thing. Dil is too much, too much heat and skin and curiosity. They push him away as gently as they can. Stand and let the wind catch their hair, shake the feathers and the beads, stir the tails of their coat.

Over by the rail, the sky is everywhere.

“She killed herself. When the war ended and my father didn’t come back.”

Dil moves like a cat, so they don’t hear him. But they feel him in the shifting air, the ripple of his footsteps. “Why?”

“Shame? Grief? Loneliness? I have no answers.” Shadowless is warm beneath Byron Kae’s hands, as familiar as their own skin, pulsing with aether and power. “I heard . . . I heard she was his housekeeper, while he was in Canton. I don’t know if he made her promises, or if she loved him; if she was desperate, or if she simply wanted a different world. I just know she . . . I just know I was alone, and nobody knew what to do with me. Where I belonged.”

Dil pushes up under their arm and wriggles and wriggles until he’s right there, tucked between Byron Kae and Shadowless. He has to lean back a little to meet Byron Kae’s eyes, his body pulled into lines at once both tough and yielding. The scent of sun and sweat is all over him like the last of the light.

And this time, touch isn’t wrong at all.

“I won’t never leave you ever,” Dil promises, with all the certainty of his maybe nineteen years. “Cos we belong on Shadowless now, right?”

They nod.

Shadowless.

Jane.

And Dil.

Whose mouth forms the shapes of untaken kisses when he stands so close and says such things.

“Y’know—” Dil eases himself onto the railing “—why don’t you start it properwise?”

He’s framed by Byron Kae, the horizon at his back, with only trust to hold him. “Like this?” they ask.

“Exactly like this.”

For a moment, there’s nothing. Nothing but the wind and the shadows and the first few snail-trails of starlight over the darkening sky.

Then—for Dil, and Dil alone—come words.

A story.

The truth is, Dil, I don’t begin with two people.

I begin many years ago with two empires: one celestial, one industrial. My father was dispatched to China sometime in the 1830s, to support the chief superintendent of trade in securing British interests in the Far East. I was born in Guangzhou—Canton to the Europeans—in 1839, in the Thirteen Factories. I never saw the interior of the city itself—it’s forbidden to the fang-qi, which is the name the Celestials have for foreigners. I believe it means “outlandish devil” or something very similar. But my only real experience of Canton—which, I believe, some of the airmen called the city of boats—was passing through it as I left the Celestial Kingdom behind me. I was fourteen, and Lord Wolfram had decided—or been required—to claim me.

I was taken to Hong Kong shortly after the war—early in 1843, I think. I don’t know for certain, I’ve had to construct this history from papers and fragments of other people’s memories. Before my father’s summons came, I lived behind the white walls of Headquarters House in the care of the general officer commanding. He was . . . not unkind. But so much of life was distant to me: something on the horizon, shown to me in pictures, or written about in books, caught on the edges of conversations between strangers. It was not until my return to Canton, standing on the skydock, waiting to be taken to a place called England, that suddenly everything was real: life in all its ugly-beauty-truth, the junks and the lorchas, the sampans and the lantern-strung flower barges, all jostling with the European clippers on the muddy brown waters of the Pearl River.

Lord Wolfram had sent an airship because it was too close to typhoon season and the seas might be treacherous. We left at first light, when the whole sky was flame. Oh Dil, you’ve never seen a sunrise, or a sunset, til you’ve been in the East. I’d watched from my windows, but this felt like the first and only one I’d ever truly seen. My last, most vivid memory of Canton: slashes of gold and scarlet falling in searing benediction over the river, the mountains, and the jumble of curling, ochre-tinted roofs.

I . . . I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m telling this well. It’s very confused.

Naw, ’tis all good. I just like listening to you talk. I’m kinda fuddled though. Cos I don’t know nowt about no war, and I think you said you was born in thirteen factories which is like seriously hard-core.

Oh dear . . . No, the Thirteen Factories is the name of the foreign quarter in Canton. The buildings aren’t actually factories like in Gaslight. They’re warehouses and trading posts, with apartments above. They were built so close to the river that I saw them as the airship was leaving. They reminded me of where I had lived in Hong Kong, strange and square and regimented. I had envied the other houses, so brightly coloured, with their curving roofs and ornamental dragons. The airship captain pointed out the New English Factory, where he said my father had most likely stayed.

The place where I was born. Where my mother died.

But I remember nothing, almost nothing, and nobody ever spoke to me about it. They talked to each other, whispered sometimes, and the major general wrote a lot of letters. That was how I knew she was dead. They called her a poor woman, but they didn’t say it kindly.

She had been waiting for him. At the end of the war. Watching out for his sails on the horizon. But he never came back. I don’t know if he’d ever intended to.

Sometimes I think there must have been something of love in it. Something like love anyway. The first thing—indeed, the only thing he said to me—when I arrived in England, before he locked me away behind high walls and wrought iron gates, was that I looked like her. It’s a strange thought, Dil, to know you look like someone you’ve never seen, and hardly anyone remembers.

I used to search for her in the mirror. Perhaps my eyes were like her eyes, or my hair as dark as her hair had been, but it’s easier to see him. In Hong Kong I knew I was fang-qi. And in Gaslight, in my father’s home, I was fang-qi still. Lady Wolfram screamed the first time she saw me.

As for the war, I don’t know much about it. I think, like everything else, it was about trade, and English merchants smuggling opium into Canton. I know there was a blockade—several blockades—and that Lord Wolfram was in command of the British fleet. I sometimes wonder if he had always expected, or perhaps intended, war. His own ship—a breathtakingly beautiful Blackwall frigate called the Victoria—

What’s that little smile all about then?

N-nothing. I mean . . . well . . . you’ll see.

Aww, you pricktease.

I don’t mean to be.

’S’okay. I reckon the best stories kinda do that. Sorta seducing you along with ’em, giving up their secrets one by one.

I-I’ve forgotten what I was saying.

Your dad’s ship.

Oh, yes. You see, the Pearl River is very shallow, and the current flows east to west, so it’s difficult to traverse. But Lord Wolfram had secretly commissioned a ship from Gaslight, a vessel of steam and iron and will he called the Nemesis. She was a lot smaller than the ships of the line, with a shallow draft, and she could navigate the mud flats and sandbars in defiance of even the wind. The Celestials called her a demon, for wherever she went, there followed flame and smoke and thunder.

The war ended in a treaty that pleased nobody. Reparations were paid and strictures lifted, and the island of Hong Kong ceded to Her Majesty’s government, for its position, I think, though the British thought it little more than a barren rock, and a handful of fishing villages. I was taken there in the care of the major general, though I don’t remember how it was arranged. I suppose they didn’t know what else to do with me. Perhaps it was only meant to be temporary, but Lord Wolfram had other wars to fight, and so I stayed behind. An afterthought, waiting for something I didn’t understand.

For ten years, Headquarters House, an island on an island, was my whole world. A makeshift, ramshackle world, taking shape around me. When I first arrived, there was only a single road leading from the waterfront, a scattering of buildings hastily constructed from matting and wood, and some of the British officials had to be accommodated in tents. I don’t think they were very pleased about it. But Queenstown and I . . . we grew together, through fire and flood and fever, and by the time I was old enough to know a little of myself, and my place in this changing, self-creating world, I could stand on the veranda of the house and see shops, taverns, post offices, brothels, hotels, barracks, a police station, a thriving community. A part of my landscape at once so close and so distant, like the emerald slopes and pearlescent, pink-edged mists of Victoria Peak, which I saw every day, but never visited.

As I got older, there were tutors, though they never stayed with me long. There was a missionary, I think, and an old navy surgeon. I met some of the Celestials too, traders mostly, or pirates, seeking new opportunities in this new place, who had grown accustomed to foreign ways. We spoke in English, or sometimes the pidgin they used in Canton, because it was forbidden to teach Chinese or Manchu to fang-qi. Sometimes I’d meet visitors to the major general, usually the wives of diplomats and administrators. What a pretty girl, they’d say, or what a handsome boy.

But wasn’t you lonely?

I . . . I don’t know. I suppose I must have been, but I’m not sure how I knew how to be. On clear days I could see all the way to the bay, and now I’m afraid it sounds a little odd, but I watched everything and everyone, and I thought that was my place, somehow. My part to play. I saw the ships come in and depart again, I saw the people who stayed, and the people who left, the ones who lived their lives by routine, and the ones who didn’t. It was closeness of a kind.

I only really began to understand loneliness when they took me to Gaslight.

I hated it there. There was nothing to see, just the walls of the estate, and the heavy sky. Everything felt enclosed and empty at the same time, mansions that would stand, unchanging, for centuries to come. And I was frightened of the wide-open streets where all footsteps echoed. I couldn’t sleep, that first night, knowing how easily evil spirits would find me in such a place. I saw them drifting over the cobbles and gathering round the house, mournful and malignant, with tattered robes and curving fingernails, and their hungry, empty eyes. Or perhaps I slept in spite of my fears, and only dreamed, because suddenly I found myself in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar darkness, screaming.

I think I must have scared the servants half to death. First with my cries, and then my breathless tales—half in English, half in pidgin—of devils and ghosts and monsters. I was summoned to Lord Wolfram’s study the next morning. The way he stood and held himself, he was a man of stone and steel in the pale Western sun. He told me he would suffer ignorance and superstition in no child of his, and that I was never to speak such nonsense again.

“It is not nonsense,” I answered. “It is common knowledge. Evil spirits can only fly in straight lines and cannot turn corners, which is why houses are built close together, and facing one another, with blessings of happiness and prosperity inscribed above the doors.”

Lord Wolfram had the lightest eyes I’d ever seen. They were grey like the world he’d brought me to. “Evil spirits do not exist. Such credulous notions are for women, children, and foreigners.” He reached out and touched my hair, which I’d always worn long. It was not a gentle touch, nor rough especially, just impatient and careless, as if he wasn’t touching a person at all. “And you are done with such . . . ambiguities.”

Even now I don’t know what possessed me to speak to him as I did. I think it was fear, and wanting my hair free of his fingers. “I came on a flying ship to a city lit by artificial suns hanging from the branches of metal trees. I do not believe ambiguities are so easily dispensed with.”

He did not even reply. Simply turned away, and I was handed to the man I would later learn was to be my tutor. Claverslick was his name. We despised each other. He had been in the service of Lord Wolfram’s family his whole life. He was a narrow-eyed, thin-lipped man, neither tall nor short, one of those people the years seemed to have whittled to the coldest, sharpest quintessence of their nature. On that first occasion, as on many others, he taught my father’s lessons with a switch. And when I wept—shock, I think, more than pain, at first—he chastised me for that as well. He said my father would not abide such weakness. I was at once instinctively mortified and bewildered. It had never before occurred to me that tears were shameful.

Yet he always made a point of striking me until they came.

I thought him monstrous, of course, but—looking back—I do not think he derived any pleasure from cruelty, as I know some do. His satisfaction lay in his conviction of righteousness. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he believed he was helping me. It was not quite personal in that way. But I think he saw it as his duty to correct me.

He found much to correct. I’d always been aware, in some nonspecific, ill-articulated way, of being different. But this was the first time I understood that it . . . that I . . . was wrong. And wrong in so many ways. The way I looked, the way I acted, what I said, what I thought. Everything I knew and cared about and liked or valued. I’d never had reason to believe myself particularly stupid, but, oh, I started to believe it then. I couldn’t understand what they wanted from me. I only knew that Claverslick was determined I should behave in a way that would bring credit to Lord Wolfram, and that this seemed entirely disconnected from anything I found natural or admirable.

Every week or so, when he was in England, I would be called to Lord Wolfram’s study, and he would ask Claverslick how I was coming along. The answer would inevitably be that I was doing poorly. At this task they had imposed on me, but not defined for me. And my father would frown and dismiss us. Once I heard him tell someone—Claverslick perhaps, but perhaps not, I don’t think they were confidants—that he would turn me into a decent English gentleman if he had to break me first to do it.

I think it was the second time he saw me that he insisted someone cut my hair. I . . . I am ashamed to remember the scene I caused, no doubt once again proving myself the savage he thought me. He had two footmen hold me down while his valet did the deed, and I screamed and wept and struggled, and uttered phrases—not, thankfully, solely in English—I had no conception I’d ever learned. Afterwards came correction and— Dil, whatever is the matter?

’Tis glimflashy-making, is all. Fucking . . . fucking . . . I ain’t got no words bad enough.

I don’t believe that for a moment. Your command of bad words is exceptional. And it was just my hair. I’m not Samson.

That ain’t the point.

No, I know. But, looking back, I feel a little foolish. It was not so great a violation, but I took it very hard. I think I felt I had so little, it was more than I could afford to lose. I should have been stronger than that. It was just . . . oh, I don’t know . . . difficult, in a manner beyond expectation or anticipation, to be suddenly made a stranger to myself. To find a reflection in the glass that spoke of someone else’s wishes, not my own, and to know that this . . . this distorted simulacrum was what the world would see. I felt beaten in ways beyond the touch of Claverslick’s switch. And I’m so sorry to be telling you all this. It’s not . . . I was young, and—

Nowt to be sorry over. I’m sorry there was times when you was sad, but that ain’t the same as being sorry to know about ’em. And, anyway, being sad ain’t no crime neither. ’Tis like that play what they was doing in Trinity. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed” and what ’ave ye.

“And I loved her that she did pity them.” We . . . um . . . we didn’t catch the end of that play, did we?

Mebbe we can sometime. I reckon that tricksy Italian cove had the hots for wossname too.

Well . . . it’s . . . um . . .

Or mebbe he stays with the gentry mort what loved him for his stories, and the other fella goes with the Florentine. Cos sounded like he liked him when he kept going on about what a proper gent he was, and trying to get him sozzled so they could bang.

I’m not quite sure it ends that way.

Well, don’t you go spoiling it.

I sincerely hope nobody spoils Othello for you, Dil. And please don’t think my life has always been loneliness and misery. It has had compensations that so many lack: comfort, safety, access to the trappings of wealth and power. Had my father not been Lord Wolfram, I don’t know what would have happened to me in Canton. I can’t imagine my mother’s family, whoever they were, would have looked kindly on a half-caste child. Perhaps I would be working for the Hong. Perhaps I would not even have survived.

My time in Gaslight was more circumscribed than it had been in Hong Kong. There were many lessons and many corrections of various kinds. But I soon discovered Lord Wolfram had an extensive library. When I am feeling ungenerous, as I sometimes am, I think it must have been a vanity project. I was the only one to use it. I had never seen so many books, all of them untouched, bound in the same dark-red leather, their pages edged in gold. At first it confused me that my father would possess something he had no interest in or care for. Then it did not.

I suppose I could have devoted myself to the study of improving literature—I recall he had all eight volumes of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—and grown into a moral, worthy, and scholarly person, but I’m afraid I much preferred poetry.

You’re a bad ’un.

Oh yes, quite wicked— What . . . what are you laughing at? Don’t laugh at my iniquity. In case you’ve forgotten, I am a pirate. Well, a buccaneer. But anyway, as you see, I was not so very wretched at Wolfram Hall.

Didn’t you have no friends, or sommat?

My time was mostly Claverslick’s, and my father’s occasionally. His son was away taking the grand tour, his daughter was at a finishing school in Switzerland, and Lady Wolfram kept to her chambers. Her health was delicate, her disposition the same. She was beautiful, I think, like a woman from a painting. I only usually saw her on social occasions, exquisite on Lord Wolfram’s arm. The rose gardens had been his wedding gift to her. In the summer months, there would be vases full of them in the entrance hall and the state rooms.

The redness of them used to make my eyes sting. And I hated the way they smelled, sweet and heavy and sour, like perfume, sweat, and death.

Once I came upon her while she was arranging them. I tried to slip away, but it was too late, and she summoned me with a crook of her finger. She was pale, in pale taffeta. I could have spanned my hands about her waist. Her fingers flitted among the roses, restless as wings.

I waited, but she said nothing. I was frightened she was going to scream again.

Eventually she pulled one of the flowers free from its fellows. It was the biggest, the most brazen, and the most sickeningly bright.

I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t see how to refuse. I reached out to take it.

In Canton and Hong Kong, opium was an expected hospitality in upper-class households, so I had some familiarity with its effects. Lady Wolfram’s eyes were almost entirely pupil but for a blurry rim of washed-out blue. “‘The invisible worm,’” she murmured, “‘that flies in the night in the howling storm: has found out thy bed of crimson joy.’”

She twisted her hand away from mine, and a thorn ripped open the skin between my thumb and forefinger. Look, I still have the scar. It’s only a little one.

Aw, mebbe I should, y’know, kiss it better.

You can’t kiss a scar bet— Oh. Um. Well. Perhaps you can.

As I hurried away, clutching the rose and trying to quell the blood before it splashed upon the pristine marble floor, I heard her whisper, “Whore’s get.”

I thought I hated her a little, at first. For those three seemingly unnecessary hurts. But I . . . I couldn’t sustain it. I do not suppose my . . . residence, for lack of a better term . . . in her home could have been pleasant for her. Perhaps she had thought Lord Wolfram a different kind of man. Or that she lived a different sort of life. I must have been a constant reminder of her powerlessness and his nature. She never had visitors of her own, and with her children far away, perhaps she was as lonely as I was. And whereas I had poetry and memories of kindness to bring me consolation when I needed it, she had only her roses and a dose of laudanum.

You see, whenever the walls seemed too high or the sky too grey, I dreamed of airships. The week-long journey from Hong Kong to Gaslight had been perhaps the happiest time of my life. My father must have paid the captain well for his services, for I travelled in luxury. I didn’t realise at the time, but I think I even slept in his cabin. And the crew treated me well, but more than that, they accepted me without question. Spoke with me and laughed with me, answered all my questions, taught me how to sing their songs. I was terrified, in some respects. So many people essentially living in a confined space. But I was giddy as well, on the closeness and the freedom.

Life is . . . People are . . . It’s different in the skies.

I met women who were not wives, foreigners who were not servants. It was not always harmonious, and there were rivalries and vendettas and plain old human dislike, but there was something deeper to hold us together. A sense of community, I suppose, forged on the edges of things. There wasn’t much privacy, so I caught glimpses of things . . . I mean, not those sort of things, though there were plenty of them. It’s hard to explain. Connections between people, friends laughing together, intimacies as simple as two matelots holding hands by starlight.

The ship was called the Valiant. Her captain was Edward Rackham.

The same Rackham what—

Yes.

I was a little frightened of him at first. He wasn’t like the Celestials, or the fang-qi I had encountered at Headquarters House: stern military men mostly, harassed administrators, or cold-eyed representatives of the East India Company. Captain Rackham was tall, sable haired, and swarthy, not handsome precisely, but he had strong hands, a devilish smile, and a decided air of command—all of which rendered him extraordinarily compelling to someone who could recite The Corsair from memory.

I was stricken with shyness, of course. And so full of juvenile longings it felt as though my whole body had turned traitor to itself. He could have taken any advantage he wished of me, and I would have welcomed it. But instead he gave me . . . he gave me his friendship. I don’t know how he had the patience, or what I did to deserve it, but it was a gift beyond price or imagining.

I was so awkward, so uncertain, so entirely the inhabitant of a world I had built for myself from scraps and whispers, but Edward . . . Captain Rackham, I mean—

You were friends, I reckon I’m awake to the notion you was probably on first name terms.

Actually, the time came that I called him Ned, but it was later, quite a bit later. He was the first person to care about my world, and to want to show me his. And I loved his world, Dil. I loved it. The sky is a harsh mistress, but she’s wild and boundless and beautiful. There was little Edward did not know about airships and about flying, and he would teach me everything, though not that first journey.

That journey he simply taught me happiness.

When we made slip at Gaslight, I truly did not wish to leave the Valiant. But Edward is . . . was . . . a man who lived by his code, and I would not have asked him to compromise his honour or endanger his crew for my sake. Later I would inadvertently lead him to do both, but standing there on the docks that day, already chilled from the drizzle, my throat clogged with dust, I was determined to be brave and selfless and make this rough-gentle man proud of me.

We’d spoken sometimes about the future that was waiting for me in England, but neither of us really knew what it might entail. Only that I’d be part of a noble family, and that it would surely bring me benefit.

“But what if I don’t want to be?” I’d asked.

He’d turned his face into the horizon. “Some things you don’t get to choose.”

Lord Wolfram had sent his carriage to collect me, as his letter had indicated he would. I recognised it by the crest. But as I approached it, I heard boot heels clatter on the boards, and I turned, and Edward was behind me, and his arms came round me, and he hugged me tight. He was warm and strong, and he smelled of sweat and the sky, and it was the first time anyone had touched me like that. It was only for a moment or two, but I felt so safe, so completely held. An enclosure that did not limit or restrict me, but was spun around me, for me. Such simple sorcery, affection.

Um, if you tighten your legs much farther, I will be too distracted to continue talking.

Sorry. I just . . . I guess I just wanted you to know I got you.

You do, Dil, you do.

I wore that hug like armour round my heart all the time I was at Wolfram Hall. Months slipped into years, and I did eventually learn how to be who I was supposed to be, and do what I was expected to do. It never felt right. I was ashamed to hate it as I did, and to prove so unfit for a life that many, I’m sure, would have thought a blessing. The years looked like bars to me, and I started to wonder if Lord Wolfram was right after all—that I was weak, and wrong, and ungrateful.

I think I was sixteen or seventeen, or thereabouts, when Lord Wolfram’s daughter came home and prepared to make her society debut. I did not think I would envy her the coming out ball, but suddenly that cold and empty house was full of light and laughter, even the stench of the roses was swept away on a rush of night air. It was wondrous, Dil. And, oh my, the dresses. So many colours and patterns, buttercup gold and sky blue for the younger ladies, and for the married ones, scarlet and emerald and indigo and burnished copper. I remember Lord Wolfram’s daughter was in ivory and pink silk taffeta. I didn’t want to be her—she was stuck greeting her guests until midnight—but I would have loved to dance, held again in someone’s arms. A private world of skin and silk and music, entire and perfect.

I watched the revelry from the garden, safe in the shadows. But dreaming of impossibilities and remembering lost things brought little comfort just then, and I was overwhelmed by a grief to which I had thought myself grown accustomed. I retreated from the terrace, and into one of the bowers in the rose gardens, where all my father’s lessons unravelled, and I cried.

I tried to stop, but I hadn’t allowed myself to weep in so long, I couldn’t. And perhaps because of that, it was ugly crying, harsh and only half-stifled in the dark. The worst of it was, it brought me little relief. I had just about run out of tears when I heard a polite, English cough, and I realised I was not, as I had thought, alone. Standing at a careful distance, somehow between accident and imposition (though I have no notion how one would manage such a thing in practice), was a tall, broad-shouldered gentleman attired in stark, black evening dress.

I cringed beneath his scrutiny, wishing for my long-gone hair to hide behind, and then turned my head away for what little privacy it could afford me. “Sir, it is not polite to . . . to . . . intrude upon another’s distress.”

To my horror, the gentleman came a little closer. “I would consider it infinitely worse to turn away. May I do anything to alleviate your sorrow?”

’Twas Ruben, weren’t it?

Of course it was. Though at the time, he was just another stranger, and I told him to go away.

“At least take my handkerchief.”

A square of bright silk fluttered in front of me, and I was in such a vile state, swollen-eyed and sticky-cheeked, that I could not refuse it.

The gentleman gave a graceful bow of the sort I was supposed to be able to perform myself and such as I’d seen the dancers in the ballroom offer their partners. Then turned away.

Which was when an unbearable thought struck me. “Please,” I called out, “please don’t tell my father you saw me crying.”

He paused. “Of course not.” He hesitated a moment, and then came back. “But, you know, there’s nothing wrong with crying. Unless you do it so liberally without a handkerchief. Then it’s rather ill-advised.”

“Crying isn’t manly.”

“Perhaps not, but it’s certainly human. I do it all the time. My name is Ruben, by the way. My father is Lord Iron.”

I blew my nose into the handkerchief, and feeling I had already trespassed enough on his good will, tried to return the now-rather-scrumpled ball of fabric to its owner.

He smiled, which made his eyes crinkle. “Keep it; I insist.”

“If you cry so much, are you very sad?” I asked him. I was feeling a little better now, and there was a warmth to this stranger’s manner that made me want to like him. And trust him. He wasn’t like the other guests, pristine in the glittering ballroom. Oh, he was dressed like them, but he was careless somehow, in all the exquisite tailoring that fit him perfectly, and not at all.

“Sometimes. But I cry for other reasons as well. Over art, or because the world is beautiful, or occasionally even in pleasure. I find it hard to account it any sort of sin.”

Perhaps because it had been a long time since someone had spoken to me as if I was their equal, and looked at me as though I was more than a problem to be solved or a misshape to be realigned, I blurted out, “I think I’m full of sins.”

He smiled at me, very gently, and took a seat on the bench. I’m sure you can imagine how Ruben looked in the rose garden by moonlight.

Mighty dimber, I reckon. You ever feel more than friendly towards him yourself?

Strangely enough, no, though he’s a good man, and I love him dearly. There’s very little I wouldn’t do for him.

Aye, figured that when you took up with some prissy motherswinker what he fancied.

Do you miss him very much?

Ol’ Milord? Like I miss crabs.

Not Milord. Ruben.

Y’know, I thought I would. I mean, I do. But you don’t begrudge a fella you care about getting what he wants.

Even if it means you don’t get what you want?

I used to think wanting was the inevitable consequence of not having. And Ruben was like the . . . the . . . apotheosis of having, to say nowt of being hot as mustard in the sack. But, truth is, wanting ain’t so simple a business, and I ain’t the same as what I used to be.

Dil, I—

Finish the story, eh? I’m kinda enjoying imagining Ruben with the roses.

As you wish.

“What sort of sins, dear-heart?” he wanted to know.

His voice was velvet-soft, and his eyes steady on mine. He was so full of impossible certainties about himself and about the world, and I wanted so much to believe in him, this man who made weakness seem like strength. I told him everything. A garbled mess, I’m sure, for much of what I had managed to put together about the circumstances of my birth and childhood I didn’t understand until later. But I spoke of my father, and Captain Rackham, and myself: all the ways I was strange, and wrong, and not what I was supposed to be. And everything I knew I shouldn’t want, but did, and could not stop myself from wanting. How I wanted to dance in a beautiful dress, and be held in a man’s arms.

“I don’t know what I am,” I finished, breathless and half-sick on confession, like the burn of a freshly lanced wound.

“You’re you.” He made it sound so very simple. Perhaps in another context it would be. It had on the Valiant. “And there’s certainly no wrong in preferring men as other men do women.”

“It . . . it is not common. And . . .” I recalled Claverslick’s switch “. . . I think neither moral nor biblical.”

“It is my own preference, and I believe the Bible, like any other book, is subject to interpretation.”

I gasped. “Is that not heresy?”

“Some might—” he frowned “—some have thought so. I’m sorry, I meant to comfort you, not to frighten you.”

“I don’t think I’m frightened.” How could I be, in the company of a man who would risk his own secrets to soothe a stranger’s fears? “But what do you mean?”

“Well, our understanding of anything is shaped by its context: to draw literalities from a text that—however divine its inspiration—is ultimately historical, is not just foolish but harmful.” His hand moved absently to touch the collar of his shirt. “The Bible tells us both ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ and ‘Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed.’ It is perverse to pretend both passages are equally pertinent to modern life. For a start, I don’t have a field.”

I laughed, and it had been so long that the sound of it surprised me. I must have lost the habit, because afterwards I had to catch my breath, and my mouth still tasted salty from my tears. “I do not believe in this Western god.” It felt wildly good to say it. It was a truth that travelled the length of my spine. Made me taller. As if, at last, I inhabited myself again. “In the land where I was born, there existed many beliefs and philosophies. Here there is only one, and it cares nothing for what is good, or what is true, or what is beautiful. It only cares to enforce what it thinks to be right, and crush all it thinks to be wrong.”

Ruben’s eyes had gone a little wide, but he only said, “In which case, I am not sure I believe in this Western god, either.”

“But are you not a Christian?”

“Oh yes. But whatever you might have been taught, that does not mean one thing. Or always the same thing. A god who exists to condemn and control, who debases love, rather than exalts it?” His smile was back, and the crinkles, and the deep brackets around his mouth. “Why would I worship him?”

I thought of fire and dark places. The switch against my skin. “Fear of punishment?”

He was silent a moment. “You’ve studied Machiavelli, haven’t you?”

I nodded. It had not engaged me, being full of war and bombast.

“You recall what he wrote about fear and love?”

Of course I recalled. I had learned my lessons well, having little choice in the matter. “He said ideally one should be both, but as it is hard to unite them in a single individual, it is safer to be feared.”

“Yes. Exactly.” His approval warmed me like the too rarely seen sun. “Fear is a tight yoke. And love is a thread as slender as a single hair that can stretch across the whole world.”

I offered him a smile. “I don’t think he put it quite like that.”

“No, but it captures the sentiment. A sentiment which, in any case, I believe to be wrong. Fear is a poor way to motivate anyone.”

“For the motivated, perhaps, but it offers consistent behaviour.”

Ruben’s hand curled into a fist on the bench between us. “Ah, but it doesn’t. Fear makes people unpredictable. Whereas love . . .”

“Is surely equally unpredictable? And Machiavelli would claim considerably more fragile a bond.”

“Perhaps, but I believe there are things we do for love far beyond anything fear could demand.”

His conviction was, in itself, rather captivating. But I was disinclined to accept something simply because I liked the idea of it. “You have seen this?”

He threw back his head and laughed, such a rich, heedless sound. “I’m a priest. Believing in things you haven’t seen is part of the job description.”

“You’re a priest?” I couldn’t keep the astonishment from my voice. He neither looked, nor spoke, nor acted like one.

A momentary hesitation. “Well, I was. I mean, I still am. I’m not sure it’s a thing you just stop being. But I can’t . . . I can’t preach anymore.”

I saw it then, the grief in him. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, but I don’t need church-sanctioned words to be of use to the world, do I? To do something good. Something that matters.”

He hunched forward, chin in his palm, intent and at the same time strangely vulnerable—this naked need in him to live according to his beliefs. It made me feel tender towards him, not just for the time he had taken to comfort me, or for his truths and his kindness, but because it seemed a dangerous thing to me, his conviction of benevolence—divine or otherwise—at the heart of the world.

“You did something good tonight,” I told him.

“Oh, nonsense, I just—”

But he was interrupted by footsteps and the click of a cane upon the terrace. “Ruben? Are you lurking out here?”

I gasped and tried to pull myself deeper into the shadows.

Ruben put a finger to his lips, and then stood. “I’m not lurking, father. I’m taking the air.”

“Well, stop taking it. I want you to dance with the Wolfram girl.”

“I’ll gladly dance with her, my lord, but I won’t marry her.”

Lord Iron, who I could not see, made a frustrated noise. “I indulged your last fancy. I will not indulge this one.”

“Believe me—” Ruben sighed “—the reason I am unsuited to matrimony is far from fancy.” He leaned down and pressed a kiss to my brow, and then slid his mouth to my ear, all warm breath, rough lips, as he whispered, “I hope you find your dance.”

I watched him as he walked away and vanished into the light.

A couple of days later, Lord Wolfram’s daughter found me in the library. It was after the rest of the household had retired, and as I had long since believed my nocturnal rebellions to be my own (and perhaps my only) secret, to say I was displeased to see her does not quite do justice to the vast mess of confusion, terror, hostility, and betrayal that rose monstrously from the depths of my heart.

She came inside, closed the door, and stood with her back against it, studying me with eyes as cold as our father’s. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she began.

I was not inclined, just then, to be civil. “Then don’t.”

We regarded each other in silence. On the mantel above the unlit fire, the Ormolu clock ticked its heavy tick.

Lord Wolfram’s daughter—Rosamond, she was called—tilted her head inquisitively. It was a charming gesture, harmless, artless, clearly practiced. “Are you truly half-Celestial? My mother says your mother was a demon whore.”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I was required to.

“You’re very beautiful.” She came a few steps farther into the room. “I thought men were supposed to be handsome.”

I stared at her, lost, anticipating cruelty, entirely uncertain what was expected of me.

“Lord Iron’s son came to visit me today,” she continued. “He is handsome. I hoped he was coming as a suitor, for his family are very rich and quite powerful, but he told me he would not make a proper husband for me. Which I took to mean he had sodomitical tendencies. Do you know what a sodomite is?”

“I . . .”

She drifted past me, her nightgown flaring in the draughts that rattled down the chimney flue. “It is a man who practices intimacies with other men. We were all lesbians at Miss Githers’s Finishing School. I believe between practicing deportment and memorising family trees, we would have all run mad had we not been fucking each other senseless. My mother’s a laudanum addict, you know.”

I opened my mouth, had no idea what I was supposed to say, and closed it again.

“Do you actually speak English? Or are you too stupid and foreign?”

“I can speak English as well as you can. You just haven’t given me any opportunity.”

“Oh, I suppose I haven’t. But I don’t often have opportunity to say things either, so when I do, they all come out at once.” She wore her hair in a long yellow braid, and now she tugged it over one shoulder and began twisting it back and forth between the fingers of one hand. “A lady says ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and ‘I am sure you are right,’ and ‘How terribly clever,’ and ‘I am having a lovely time,’ and ‘Certainly you may have this dance,’ and ‘I would be delighted,’ and ‘I do hope it won’t rain.’”

“But,” I asked, a little dizzily, “why are you telling all this to me?”

She laughed, showing small, white teeth that—in the light from my single phlogiston lamp—seemed somewhat pointed. “Why, because I can, of course. I know your secrets, so you must keep mine.”

Unease prickled across my skin. “I . . . I don’t have any secrets.”

“Yes, you do.” I suddenly noticed she had a parcel clasped in her other hand, its wrappings undone, its ribbons trailing. “Mr. Crowe asked that I give you this. He made me promise to keep it a secret. Of course I promised. And of course I opened it.”

My blood burned hot beneath my skin. It took me a moment to recognise anger. “You had no right—”

“Right-shmight. You’re the one receiving clandestine messages from Ruben Crowe.”

“But I am not. You’ve stolen my message.” What had he sent me? It wasn’t the gift itself that mattered. It was the fact he had been thinking of me.

That someone saw me, and knew me, and cared.

And now even that little piece of hope was being withheld from me at the caprice of a wilful girl.

Rosamond grinned. “He sent you a poem. It’s rather racy. Though I think this Conrad, being—of all things—a pirate himself, has something of a double standard when it comes to murder.”

I was consumed by a desperate impulse to leap to my feet and rip the parcel from her fingers, but my position within the household was precarious enough without also making an enemy of Lord Wolfram’s daughter. Assuming, of course, she was not already my enemy. “May I please have my book?”

She tossed it carelessly into my lap. The spine bent but did not break. It was indeed a first edition of The Corsair, handsomely bound in dark-green Morocco. Had I been alone, I would have delighted in it. But, as it was, I thought it best to feign indifference. Ruben had tucked his calling card inside the cover. There was no message, but the book and the card were message enough.

His friendship. His aid, if I needed it.

I slipped his card into the interior pocket of my coat and stood. For once I would welcome the confines of my cold little room. At least there my secrets would remain my own.

“Where are you going?” demanded Rosamond.

“To bed?”

“Well, I’m not done with you. I wish to establish the terms of our arrangement.”

I folded back into the chair, more in bewilderment than obedience. “Our . . . arrangement?”

“Yes, our reciprocal secret-keeping arrangement. I will expect you here at half past midnight every day to perform friend duties as I see fit.”

“You want me to be your friend?” The expression on my face, I’m sure, must have been ridiculous.

She gave me a sharp, cold look. “No, I wish you to perform friend duties.”

“Like what?”

“I will inform you as they are required. You may begin by listening to me.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I will tell my father you are the catamite of Ruben Crowe.”

I could not stifle my gasp of horror. “Oh, but . . . oh, but I am not.”

“And I’m sure he’ll be perfectly understanding when you tell him that.”

“You have no proof.”

She laughed again, a trained and tinkling laugh. “You’re holding proof. Why else would Mr. Crowe be sending you such tokens?”

“I . . . I’ll destroy it.”

“Don’t be nonsensical. I can see how much you value it. Besides, I shall have no need of it when I spin my tale of rampant deviancy in the Celestial drawing room.”

I bowed my head, silent, Ruben’s book warming between my hands.

“You have pretty eyelashes.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me.” I met her unwavering porcelain gaze. “If you want to be friends, why not just . . . ask?”

“You’re a bastard half-breed whoreson. I don’t have to ask you anything.” She dragged one of the wingback chairs away from the fireplace, and sat down in it, pulling her knees up under chin, her braid falling between them. “Now, I’m going to tell you who I danced with tonight, and you will help me rate them according to their husbandly suitability. I’ve devised some categories, and I will present them in ascending order of value: comeliness, agreeableness, fortune, strength of character. I believe my father would prefer I prioritise fortune, but it is more important to me to find a husband with very little strength of character, as I believe I would find marriage grossly disagreeable otherwise.”

When she finally released me from my friend duties, it was close to four in the morning. I lay under my covers, still fully dressed because it was Gaslight-cold in my room, that heavy chill that seeps through your skin all the way to your heart. It flayed me. I had grown up beneath an unhindered sun.

The room was full of a paper-grey light, and I could hear the drizzle rustling against my windows. I was still holding the book Ruben had given me, clutched tightly to my chest, and I was thinking about everything he’d said in the rose garden.

That there were things someone might do for love that they could not or would not out of fear.

That was when I first resolved to run away.

I could have gone to Ruben. I knew he would have sheltered me. But I wanted no part of this world. I wanted to make my own.

Free my heart from its shackles.

Be the wanderer of the trackless way.

There was really only one place for me to go.

I planned it, Dil. Like the most dedicated cracksman. Attended my lessons by day, my friend duties by night, and scoured the shipping bulletins for when the Valiant would next make slip in Gaslight.

It was months before I saw her name in the lists.

But Wolfram Hall had taken on a flimsy, unreal quality. It had lost its power to cow me or to hurt me. And when it was time to leave, I simply walked away.

I took nothing but the clothes I wore and my copy of The Corsair. Though that I had to sell because I needed money more than I needed a poem. I suppose that sounds rather cold, but gifts are not the gift, but the giving. I would not have done it if I thought Ruben would have minded.

You should’ve stripped the joint before you left.

Pardon?

Aye, heaved the cough, and heaved it bene.

You mean . . . I should have robbed my father’s home?

Course. Like, duh.

And confirm his ill opinion of me?

He already had ill opinion of you. Fucker wouldn’t’ve ordered his lackey to beat you if he didn’t. You might as well have taken sommat back.

Goodness, no. I don’t want anything—anything—of his.

Y’know, for all the things you ain’t, you still think like a swell, through and through.

What do you mean?

That kinda stupid-arse pride is rich-boy thinking. ’Tis the first thing you shed when you’re hungry.

Oh, I never thought of it that way.

It ain’t no hardship competition, sweeting. I’m glad you ain’t ever had to.

The truth was, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find the docks on my own, so I hired a horseless carriage from my meagre funds. When I’d first arrived in Gaslight, it was late, and I’d been exhausted, so the journey to the Golden Quarter had passed in a blur of oily orange phlogiston and held-back tears. But somehow, in the confusion and anxiety, the sheer vastness of the city had escaped me.

I’d grown so accustomed to silence and cold stone.

But Gaslight midmorning . . . it was . . . I can’t . . . just a . . . a ceaseless butter churn of humanity, the horizon dark with the shadows of the factories, and at its centre, a great granite spire, vanishing into the perpetual smog.

The carriage whisked me through the dockland slums and past the warehouses, but I disembarked as we neared the Mersey, thinking it would be easier from there to find my way on foot. It reminded me a little bit of Canton—there was that same sense of a world in motion—but here there were only rows of European vessels, their sails folded away like the wings of caged birds. They were so beautiful, even tethered.

I had been brought here on one other occasion, when I was to greet my father on his return from the East. There had been another incident in Canton, which he had apparently handled in a decisive and honourable manner. I am not sure of the details.

It was a peculiar afternoon. I recall it with . . . mixed emotions.

I was taken aboard my father’s frigate, the Victoria. Oh, she was exquisite, Dil, even then, an Arab steed of a ship, all sleek lines, elegance and power, the intermittent Gaslight sun gleaming on her hull. The thing about airships is that we build them to lift weights and carry cargo, but tall ships we build to chase our dreams. To put the wind at our backs and make the stars our companions and the whole world our tomorrow. You may call me fanciful if you wish, but it was love at first sight.

There was recognition, too, a memory from so deep in the past, it was more of a sense than a thought: a pattern of sails against the sky, a fleeting certainty of warmth. I had been desperate once upon a time for stories of my mother and my father, searching in my childish way for some kind of understanding of who and why I was. I’d only ever been able to piece together rumours and fragments, but there on the grey Mersey beneath a steely Gaslight sky, I knew we’d waited for him, my mother and I, watching together for the shadow of the Victoria on the distant horizon. I closed my eyes and I could feel her arms around me, smell the jasmine of her hair.

Perhaps my father’s ship should only have reminded me of loss. But she felt like freedom and like home, and what I found that day was the possibility of hope, something I’d as good as forgotten in Claverstick’s classroom, behind the walls of Wolfram Hall.

As ever, Lord Wolfram and I had little to say to one another. But as he showed me his ship, things became a little easier. It was the first time he had ever really spoken to me, and it was the first time I had ever really listened to him. Perhaps I am ungrateful, for he had given me a home, and as you so rightly point out the advantages of wealth, an education. But of himself, he had given me only his disappointment.

Afterwards, we stood on the quarterdeck together, my father surveying his kingdom, his hands folded behind his back, shoulders square. “Twenty-four thirty-two pound carronades on her main deck, eight thirty-two pounders on her quarter- and foredecks, reinforced hull, and she still comes about like a clipper. One of the fastest ships in these waters if you know how to sail her.”

His attention flicked to me. And I . . . I smiled at him.

Even now, I don’t know why. I didn’t like the man. All that connected us was blood and time. But perhaps there are moments when those things feel like enough.

“Well,” he said, “what do you make of her?”

The heavy armament, while they might not have compromised her speed, compromised her grace. Had she been mine, I would have dispensed with them, and made the bulkheads flush to her curves.

Like Shadowless?

Yes. Exactly like Shadowless.

Nevertheless, I answered without hesitation, “She’s beautiful.”

But Lord Wolfram only frowned. “Have you learned nothing from me?”

And then I was taken home. I realised only later that the lesson was about power, and that my father and I would never understand each other. That was freedom, too, of a kind.

Unfortunately my memories of a single afternoon with Lord Wolfram did not help me now. I knew where the Valiant was berthed—docking platform nine—and I could see the docking pylon itself, a latticed tower of steel and brass, casting a web of shadow across the domed roof of the Custom House. But suddenly the world seemed quite extraordinarily huge, and I felt quite extraordinarily small, and the uncertainties I had spent the past months absolutely refusing to countenance came upon me in a horrible flood.

How was I to get to the Valiant? What was I to do when I got there? Would Captain Rackham even want me? What could I do or give that was worth doing or giving? I wish I could say I steeled myself and found some well of courage or resilience, but I was simply out of options. I could have gone back, but I feared the beating that likely awaited me. And I feared the long days, drawing ever further from myself, into some grey ending of all things that mattered.

As I approached the pylon, I saw the lift gliding up and down the central shaft, but my attempt to nonchalantly board it was thwarted by a burly man who demanded to see my papers. Needless to say I had none, and my stammering attempt to convince him I had good reason to be admitted was . . . not successful. I made my way to the custom house to see if I could acquire a day pass, but I had no credentials, no identification, insufficient funds for the necessary bribes, and I couldn’t even construct a plausible lie.

Why not?

I . . . I don’t know. I just couldn’t think of one.

Aww, bless your little nuts.

It’s not funny. I just find lying very complicated and difficult to keep track of. It has to make sense, and then you have to remember what lies you told and . . . and— Oh, stop laughing. And, in any case, dealing with the administration would probably have taken longer than I had. Than any sane person had. Whatever the intended system, it had been supplanted by yelling, and waving papers, and physically waylaying officials as they tried to push through the mob.

At the time, I was too lost and anxious to be able to make much sense of what was going on. It was 1856, you see—although now I consider it, I slightly flinch at thinking how old you must have been then—and Anstruther Jones, a skyminer of no birth and no importance, had recently become the richest man in Gaslight. So the Bureau of Skyclaims was overwhelmed by prospectors, all looking to make a fortune from the sky. Some of them would even succeed, but none, I think, have come close to rivalling Anstruther Jones. Rosamond told me she met him once at a ball. She said he was terribly vulgar and exciting and impertinently tall. In the Golden Quarter they called him the Phlogiston Baron, but he wore it like an honour, not an insult. It was the last thing we spoke of before I fled for good.

I left the chaos of the Custom House with such a sense of relief that I almost forgot my predicament. As I stood awhile, watching the narrow boats gliding over the curling grey waters of the Mersey, I came to the conclusion there was only one thing to be done.

I would have to climb the docking pylon.

Uh, y’know, there’s like a service lift round the back, right? ’Tis unwatched, and even a bantling could charm the jig without a screw.

There’s a what, and a what can what?

The lock. It ain’t secure.

How do you know this?

I been up the docking pylon a bunch of times. Not for no reason, mind. Just sometimes I had an itch to see stars ’n’ shit. And now I got ’em whenever I want ’em, so it’s all good. Did you really climb all the way up there? ’Tis fucking massive. Wasn’t you scared?

Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t. Falling doesn’t frighten me. It never has. The pylon was easy to climb, because of the crisscrossing metalwork, lots of handholds and footholds, but it was tiring. I kept to the interior, where I was relatively sure nobody would be likely to see me, and I rested often. I was wind buffeted, and ruffled, and my muscles ached, and my hands were raw . . . but I . . . it . . . felt good.

My heart grew lighter, beat stronger, the farther I climbed.

Leaving the whole world behind.

When I came to the first level of docking platforms, I slithered between the slats, smoothed my clothes and caught my breath, trying to look like I was supposed to be there.

I’m sure you was totally subtle and convincing.

Why am I getting the sense you have a low opinion of my capacity for felonious behaviour?

Cos you ain’t got no capacity. ’Tis one of the reasons I l-like you so much.

It mattered little, regardless. Nobody paid much attention to me as I made my way between the platforms where the airships rested like slumbering beasts, looking for the Valiant. And when I found her, the sight of her, just as I remembered . . . It was like greeting an old friend after a long absence, the joy and the sheer relief. I felt almost faint with longing to be with Captain Rackham and his crew again, to be up in the skies, to be home.

And, once again, I found myself at a loss. Did I ask too much of a man I had not seen in over three years? Would he remember me? And what if he turned me away? I knew the ship as well as my own body—perhaps better—so it would have been easy enough to slip aboard and conceal myself until we were up in the blue and it was too late to take me back. But I could not bring myself to do it. I asked too much already.

Footsteps sounded behind me, and the moment was suddenly so familiar, so desperately yearned for, that I spun round and without even thinking about it, threw myself shamelessly into Captain Rackham’s embrace.

He drew me in tight, just as he had before, and enfolded me. He looked the same—a little older perhaps, a few more lines about his eyes—and he smelled the same, and I could have wept with gladness.

At last, he put me from him, holding me at arm’s length so he could look at me. I wondered how much I had changed. If he could still see me beyond the façades other people had built. He shook his head, as if in wonder at the sight of me, and I flinched . . . feeling ugly, and untrue. “No word in all this time. I thought you’d forgotten us.”

I clung to his hands. “No, no, never . . . I . . . I couldn’t . . .They wouldn’t let me and . . . and . . . I . . .” He hushed me, and would have held me again, but everything caught up with me, the last few months, the travails of the day, a tangle of unhappiness and hope and longing, and I crumpled to his feet. “Please, take me away with you. I’ll do anything. Whatever you need, whatever you want, however lowly, how difficult, I won’t complain, and I won’t let you down. Just take me with you. I can’t stay here. I can’t.”

I was too desperate to be embarrassed. And Edward simply gathered me up and carried me aboard. Wrapped me in a blanket, and held me with impossible patience, until I remembered how it felt to be safe, and seen, and known.

I’m glad you had someone who could give you sommat like that.

It was . . . he was . . . exactly what I needed. And I think I will always love him for it until the day the sky takes me.

Well, love ain’t no finite thing. It don’t get lessened by being shared about, nor die with death.

Loss leaves hollow places.

And love finds new ’uns. The crew didn’t mind you joining ’em?

Well, Buccaneer crews have their own ways. It’s not like the airnavy. Edward told me that for him there was no question, but if I wanted to join the crew, it would have to go to a vote. It was honestly more than I expected. Better than I’d hoped for. Most of the crew remembered me, and Captain Rackham spoke for me, so it was nearly unanimous. All that remained was to sign the ship’s articles, but quill in hand, I hesitated, ink sliding slickly down the nib and blotting the already-blotted paper.

It was not regret, apprehension, or even uncertainty that stayed my hand.

I didn’t know how to sign.

Not the name my father had given me. And I did not know my mother’s.

I think Edward must have understood what troubled me, for he touched my fingers lightly with his own, and whispered, “Choose, choose and be free.”

Strange, isn’t it, the way some decisions that ought to be the most . . . significant, or definitive, are ultimately the simplest.

The ones that require the least thought.

I wrote Byron.

Realising I needed something else, I glanced round for inspiration and saw across the way some signage for an airfreight company called Kaisership.

So I wrote Kai, but the ink had been gathering too long, so I smudged the “i” and everyone always read it as “e.”

And that’s how I, at last, became who I am.

I was with the Valiant for a little over a year, and I was blissfully happy. I worked harder than I’d ever worked in my life before, but I held true to the promise I’d made Edward that day on the docks: I never shirked, never flinched, never complained. But, truthfully, it was an easy promise to keep. When my back ached, and my hands grew calluses, and the wind seared my eyes, and the rain stung my skin, I rejoiced simply to be alive, to own my body and all its pain and pleasures, and live a life I had chosen.

A life which suited me.

Where I didn’t feel strange at all.

I learned anything anyone wanted to teach me. How to plot a course, how to use a sextant, how to name the stars, how to tie a knot, how to sew a sailcloth, how to fasten a corset, how to play the bandoneon. And, at night, with Edward I learned . . . I learned . . .

Bonking?

Love. I learned love.

But there was bonking, right?

Yes, there was . . . bonking, and in abundance.

Was it bene?

Um, yes, it was lovely.

Ain’t you going to tell me?

It’s not really . . . necessary, to the story.

Course it’s necessary. Ain’t a proper story without no sexy times.

Yes, but I’m . . . embarrassed.

What’s to be embarrassed over? ’Tis only good ol’-fashioned clicketing. Most natural thing in the world.

No, I know that, but trying to—

I’m just funning. It’s for my mind’s eye, dontcha know, making sure I’m picturing it right: dimber ol’ you and a likerous skypirate all tangled up like socks on laundry day.

Dil! Don’t picture it! And I’m not . . . I’m not pretty like that.

You ain’t looking at you.

Are you . . . you . . . flirting with me?

I’m trying to flirt with you. Ain’t the same thing, believe me.

But why?

Cos I want to, nidgit.

Oh . . . oh . . . but why?

Right now, I have no fucking idea, cos I reckon I’d have more luck sticking my wang through a hole in a bucket. I thought you liked me. You used to anyways.

Of course I like you . . . I . . . I more than like you.

Aye, and I more than like you too. Captain Edward, though—he was good with you?

He was . . . very good. Rough and tender and thorough. Beneath his hands, I felt precious. It was . . . it was flying without need for wings. I loved being with him. Not just in those intimate ways, though I treasured them, but at his side, part of his crew. They all knew I was his sweetheart, but nobody resented me for it. In the sky, everything is touched by transience, so you hold fast to each other, lovers and friends and family. And . . . and . . . all those people are dead now. My family. My Ned.

I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. We don’t have to talk about any of it.

No . . . it helps. As long as we tell their stories, the people we love will never be lost.

You said you were with ’em for a year? Why you’d part ways?

It wasn’t a choice. I’d been foolish to believe my father would not come after what he believed to be his.

But until then, all was well. The skies have their dangers, but they were dangers I did not fear: restless krakens, pirates, storms, and rough weather. We navigated the edges of a changing world, one that was suddenly full of travellers, and where refuelling rigs were rapidly becoming settlements. It was on the outskirts of one such place, a half-built tangle of disconnected platforms that would later come to be called Prosperity, that I saw my first aethermancer.

Is there lots?

I’m not sure . . . four, I think, but there could be more now.

Did you know straight off you wanted to be like what he was?

She. Nancy Doolittle is her name. I don’t know what she did before, but now she builds skytowns. Prosperity, Temperance, Calumny, Mercy, all her handiwork.

You ain’t answered the question.

It’s hard to answer. I was so happy, I couldn’t have imagined envying anybody. But she was . . . she was magnificent. Her power as extraordinary as it was terrifying. She had wings, Dil, vast wings.

Like an angel?

More like a bat, membranes stretched across cartilage, across which flickered oily reflections of impossible constellations and broken cities. And her eyes were like my eyes are now, aetherstruck and full of stars. She was standing on a floating platform, the pieces of what would become a town flying and fitting into place around her, controlled by nothing but her will.

It was a remarkable thing to see, but my life felt full of remarkable things. Some of them almost unbearable in their magnitude, like the wildness of the sky itself, and others so private and so simple, like Edward’s arms around me, or his body moving with mine.

I certainly did not see my future in her stars.

But if you’d told me, I wouldn’t have flinched. Not everyone is suited to the . . . the . . . aetheric changes, and if it had been more of a choice, it might still have been the one I made.

Not long after we left Prosperity, the lookout spotted a scarlet distress flare on the horizon. There’d been reports of rough weather and restless skies, which usually meant kraken, so we approached with caution. This close to the stratosphere and far from everything else was prime hunting ground for pirates and wreckers. We’d had some tussles in the past, but nothing the Valiant couldn’t handle. She was well armed and well armoured and crewed by a committed . . . um . . .

Crew?

Exactly. Like most buccaneers, Edward took the jobs that paid, but he erred on the side of the law, and we’d brought the occasional fugitive to justice in the past. For the money, obviously, but as he said “a warm fuzzy feeling don’t hurt none, either.” So while I’m sure we weren’t precisely popular with the criminal element, we weren’t easy pickings, and mostly we sailed untroubled.

A quick vote, and it was agreed to investigate. One of the secrets, I’ve found, of lawless places is how quickly they develop their own codes. Honour is too oppressive a word for it, survival too base. A kind of mutuality, I suppose.

As we approached, it seemed as though we had, indeed, come across a damaged freighter—the Plymouth. Our lists were a few months out of date, but she was Gaslight registered, and supposedly en route to Prosperity. She was skyhooked, but listing, and flying distress flags. It was quiet on deck, and the visibility was poor, but we could definitely make out the shapes of bodies through the haze of smoke and sky.

And that was when I realised: bodies.

Corpses.

Edward came to the same conclusion at the same time. “Turn us round.”

The helmsman spun the wheel, and we veered, but it was too late.

Oh Dil, please don’t look so frightened. I promise our hero survives.

Got caught in the moment. Don’t spoil it.

Sorry. Well, the Plymouth exploded. I remember not so much the noise of it, although that was horrifying, but the ferocity of the heat, the physical strength of it, like a great roaring beast that rushed upon us, knocking the ship off course. Edward threw me to the ground as ash and shrapnel and splintered wood exploded overhead.

And then a second impact shook us from starboard: a full broadside from a pirate vessel. Under normal circumstances, she would have been no match for the Valiant, but the explosion had as good as crippled us.

Edward pushed me into a corner and ran to the defence of his ship. I felt . . . helpless, Dil. I was frightened, not so much for myself . . . but there was something about the intensity of violence, the sudden reality of loss. Everything had happened so quickly, but I couldn’t shake a conviction that this was wrong. Not just the attack itself, but the nature of it. Pirates were scavengers and opportunists. They did not lay traps. At least, not for not an airship carrying nothing much of value.

We returned fire, scoring a direct hit to one of the engines, and another to the hull, but we’d already taken too much damage to turn the tide of battle. Fires raged below decks, we’d lost all our engines, and we were hanging helplessly from skyhooks, unable to manoeuvre or protect ourselves, as gangplanks came down, and grapples were thrown, and pirates swarmed aboard.

It was chaos. An unequal fight.

All I could smell was burning. All I could hear was screaming. The deck was sodden with blood.

I can’t fight. I couldn’t then. But I didn’t want to be the coward who watched his friends die, so when a sabre rolled towards me, I inched forward to pick it up.

Almost immediately, a boot came down on my fingers. And when I looked up, the cold mouth of a pistol caught me under the chin.

“Ah-ah-ah, sunshine.”

I froze.

I realised that I could hear nothing but the thrashing of engines.

We’d surrendered.

I don’t know happened next. I couldn’t move, or see. I could only kneel at the feet of a harsh-voiced stranger, with their foot on my hand, and their gun against my throat. At last, I was pulled upright, my hands shackled behind my back, and I was pushed and shoved towards the pirate vessel. A sharp-nosed, slim-line little skyclipper called the Revenge.

“Please, what’s happening, are the others—”

Someone struck me. I was briefly aware of pain and the taste of blood. Both distant. Unimportant. What was happening? Where was Edward? My friends?

“I want—” I tried again.

And the shadow of a hand rose once more, but this time the blow was intercepted. Pulled aside.

The one who had called me sunshine said, “Not this one. Remember what the man said.”

That shocked me into silence. What man? Why was I to be treated differently?

Once aboard the Revenge, I looked frantically for the rest of the crew, but they had either already been taken away, or killed on the Valiant. The pirates shoved me into a cabin and locked the door behind me. It was well-appointed—lavish even, hung with crimson satin—but what I needed was a weapon, or an escape route or . . . or something.

There was nothing.

At least nothing I could contrive with my hands chained behind me.

I simply sat on the edge of the bed and waited. Listened to the sounds from above. Hoped.

At last, we began to move. I gazed out of the window, trying to guess at our course from our speed and the position of the sun. We were travelling slowly, and I could hear a distinct edge of strain in the turning of the turbines, so either the ship had been damaged in the battle, or they were towing the Valiant.

Would they scrap her? Sell her? Ransom her back to Edward?

Could he afford to pay?

And what was going to happen to me?

The sun had long set, and my anxieties had festered like gangrene, by the time the door opened. I recognised the red velvet coat of the pirate who had captured me. The captain?

She tugged off her plumed hat and threw it aside. Crossed the room with a rolling, airman’s gait, and stood looking down at me.

“Well, sunshine.” Before I could flinch away, she put her fingers beneath my chin, just as she had held me with her pistol, and forced my face up. “Someone wants you mighty bad.”

I stared at her. I had so many questions, and now they were dry on my lips.

“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue? Speechless with my beauty?” She put her spare hand to her face and traced the deep scars that ran from brow to eye, eye to mouth, mouth to cheek. “’Twas a gift from the crime prince of Gaslight.”

I swallowed. “Who . . . who are you?”

“Name’s Bonny Sharpe. Captain Bonny Sharpe. And you won’t have heard it, cos I’m good at what I do.”

“And what’s that?”

“What other people won’t.” Her eyes scanned my face, acquisitive and curious. “But y’know, sunshine, who I am ain’t half as interesting as who you are.”

“I’m nobody.”

“Nobody pays this much for nobody. What you do? Piss off your boyfriend?”

Someone had paid these people to take the Valiant and capture me? For a moment, I couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing, or why. And then I knew it for the cold act of possession it was. “My father.”

She laughed. “And I had you down for a high-price doxy—”

“I’m not a doxy!”

“—and you’re naught but a poor little rich kid playing pirate.” My hair had grown long again, and she touched the tangled tresses lightly. “What you supposed to be, anyhow?”

“Does it matter?”

“Not to me, it don’t. I got . . . wossname . . . liberal tastes.” She left my hair. Stroked the edge of my cheek, the tips of my nervously fluttering lashes. “If you was a doxy, I’d pay.”

I was scared and confused, but just about capable of recognising a sincere, if completely bizarre, compliment when I received it. As you’ve already seen, coquetry is not among my skills, but I tried to give her (please don’t laugh) what I hoped was a . . . sultry look. “If I was a doxy, surely you wouldn’t have chained my hands.”

Her mouth, already misshapen from the scars, twisted into a grin, and I caught the glint of gold teeth. “I don’t know, depends what you was up for. And I ain’t no blubberwit, sunshine. You ain’t getting loose.”

I was mortified. Bad enough to be willing to play those sort of games, worse still to be terrible at them. “Please,” I tried, “if this is really about me, can’t you let the others go?”

“No can do—your captain’s wanted for kidnapping.”

“What? Kidnapping who?”

“You, sunshine.”

“No—” I rattled my chains “—that’s . . . not true. I ran to him. He loves me.”

She was silent for a moment. Then, with flat contempt, “Gawww.” Pulling away from me, she began dragging the pistols from her sash. I winced with every clunk as they hit the tabletop. “Truth don’t pay bounties. And the ship is worth a pretty penny too.”

“Is that all you care about? Money?”

She half turned. Gave me another incredulous look and gestured at herself: “Pirate?”

Needless to say, it was not an easy journey. She kept me in her cabin, like a pet, but I suspect it was for my own safety. At least in the sense that my safety was her profit. That first night, as she climbed into bed—still fully dressed but for her boots and coat, while I (for pride’s sake) quivered in the chair—she told me that if I tried to escape or otherwise annoyed her in any way, she’d have one of the prisoners brought up from the brig and shot in front of me.

It was enough to guarantee my obedience.

Honestly, it could have coerced far more from me than that.

But while she would occasionally ask if I was sure I didn’t want to fuck—promising she’d treat me good if we did—she never pressed the matter. I resented having to feel grateful to her for anything, but for that small decency, I did.

I saw her only at night. Usually she would disarm herself and drink. If I tried to ask after Edward, she would hush me with an irate look and mime a pistol with her fingers and thumb. It must have been the third evening when she lost patience with whatever slight movements I was making in my chair, and dragged me into the bed with her. She threw an arm and a leg over me, less in comfort than a desire to keep me still.

In some ways, being comfortable made it worse, because there was there was no escape from thinking. Worrying. Hating that I had brought this on the people who had taken me in, and the man I loved.

“For fuck’s sake,” came a growl through the sky-rippled dark, “if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’ll give you something to fucking cry about.”

I tried. I tried my best.

“For fuck’s sake,” she said again. I felt her move, rolling onto an elbow, so she could peer at me. I turned away as best I could, but she pushed the hair out of my eyes. She seemed to like touching it. “It’s not like I’m handing you off to be tortured or killed or sent to a nunnery.”

“Would it make a difference if you were?”

There was rum on her breath as she huffed out a laugh. “You ask the wrong questions.”

“It’s true, though, isn’t it?”

“True ain’t the same as relevant.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I only knew it wasn’t an answer. “I don’t care what happens to me,” I told her. “I care what happens to the others. I care that you killed an entire shipful of people just to capture me.”

“Mebbe. Or mebbe I’d’ve taken ’em anyway just cos I could. Pirate, remember. You ain’t answerable for my actions, sunshine, just your own.”

“But if it wasn’t for me, the crew of the Valiant—”

“You ain’t answerable for their actions either.”

“That seems a cold way to live.”

“’Tis an equitable way to live. And—” she fell back against the pillow “—I can sleep at night.”

As we travelled, I tried—to the best of my meagre ability—to please her. To be a good captive, a quiet bed partner, though not in the sexual sense. I felt like a traitor, but it was my only hope of advantage. Though, actually, she had little interest in companionship that wasn’t physical or found at the bottom of a bottle.

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?” I begged her one night, when she was deep in her cups.

She made me wait. Finished her drink in one long swallow. “Liberty,” she said.

“Is that . . . is it one of the skytowns?”

She shook her head. “It’s Liberty. You’ll see, sunshine.”

And that was all she would tell me.

The next day, I caught sight of a storm on the horizon—a gathering of dark sky, purpled like a bruise. I expected we would change course, but as dawn faded into morning and morning became noon, we were still heading straight for it. And as we drew closer, I realised it wasn’t like any storm I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t . . . natural. It was an open wound in the sky, spilling out an endless stream of swirling, green-tinted shadow. And at the centre there was definitely . . . something. A shape: vast, unimaginable, and undeniably other.

The storm reached out to claim us with its flickering tendrils, filling the cabin with a slick indigo darkness. The power of it scraped my skin, and caught in my throat, terrifying and exhilarating. And just beyond the window I could see . . . well, at first I thought it was a land mass of some kind, but its shape—long, and narrow, and faintly twisted—was too peculiar to be an island. Its surface was riven with deep rusty scars and grotesquely pockmarked with clusters of strange circular cavities that gaped open almost like mouths or suckers. And then I saw a ring of unblinking eyes embedded deep within what was not rock at all, but flesh—crystallised flesh, flecked with eerie iridescence.

It was a tentacle, Dil. The tentacle of a kraken.

I pressed myself to the glass, able from this angle only to see glimpses of the beast. And perhaps that was fortunate, for the sense of a hideous, immense, and inconceivable malignance was almost overwhelming.

Aye, I been up close and personal with a kraken, remember. ’Twasn’t so nice.

There were other ships too—pirate vessels mostly, but not exclusively—circling the frozen tentacles, occasionally docking on platforms embedded in the kraken’s sulphurous hide.

That was when I understood that I was looking at a city. A flying city, built around a crystallised kraken, surrounded by an aestherstorm.

This was Liberty.

I didn’t know how long it would take us to reach our destination, or what I would do when we arrived, but I could not rest. Every time I closed my eyes, my mind would swim with fragmented visions of dead stars and broken cities. And I could hear, just on the edge of consciousness, a voice that was not a voice whispering to me in a language I could not understand.

We came, at last, to what seemed to be the centre: a space between the tentacles where the wreckage of a research vessel was buried deep in the kraken’s flesh. I could just make out the remains of the name on the shattered hull: Endeavour.

We drew up alongside, and I felt the faint shudder in the body of the ship as the skyhooks caught. More noises from above. Footsteps. Shouting.

But finally, Captain Sharpe came for me, and I was dragged out on deck. The air was thick with aether, the storm writhing and hissing all around us, drenching everything in sickly luminescence.

“Don’t try anything, sunshine,” she told me, as she freed my hands.

She prodded me across a gangway to the Endeavour, where people were already waiting for me. Pirates from the Revenge. The crew of the Valiant, kneeling in chains. My father, his spine rigid, his hands clasped behind his back, standing next to some barrels bearing the stamp of the War Office. And finally, pacing impatiently, a woman in a shabby dress who nevertheless seemed to be in control of what was happening.

As I boarded, her head turned—sharp and swift like a snake—and I saw her eyes were aetherstruck. “It’s done?”

“Aye.” Captain Sharpe pushed me forward, almost making me stumble.

Lord Wolfram nodded. “Twenty barrels of military-grade phlogiston as agreed.”

“You’re trading me—” I hardly recognised my own voice “—for phlogiston?”

The woman glanced my way again, her expression unreadable. “Very valuable. Hard to secure.”

“I’m not a commodity.”

My father caught my arm and pulled me to him. “You’re my son, and you’re coming with me.”

I fought for moment, on instinct more than anything, and then forced myself to be still again. If I was to be nothing but commodity, perhaps there was more I could sell. “You have me,” I said softly. “I’ll come with you, and I’ll do whatever you want me to do. But I wasn’t kidnapped. Please let my friends go.”

His pale eyes met mine, full of ice and fury, and it was with a sense of pure shock that I realised my father—my tall father—now had to look up to me. “And have it be known that my son chose the company of vagabonds and sodomites?”

“I would rather be like them, than like you.” And I . . . I spat in his face.

He didn’t even flinch. Just let the silvery trails slide down his cheek. “Blood will out. I will see these men hanged. Take them down to the Victoria.”

He gestured to a group of men who had been waiting—somewhat gingerly—by the shattered rail. Behind them, the balloon of an airskiff bobbed on the aethercurrents with incongruous cheerfulness, and they began hustling the crew of the Valiant into the basket.

Anger, helplessness, and shame were roiling inside me like rough seas. A lifetime of powerlessness. My inability to protect the people I loved. And all I could do was struggle against my father like the helpless, voiceless adolescent he believed me to be. “I hate you. I’ll hate you until the day I die.” I twisted my arm, and sank my teeth into the back of his wrist.

“Someday,” he said, “you’ll thank me.”

And then he struck me across the face—a backhanded blow that knocked me to the ground, my mouth full of blood and my head full of light.

“Family drama very distracting.” I had almost forgotten the woman who—for whatever obscure reason of her own—had orchestrated this exchange. She had been circling one of the phlogiston barrels, but now she gestured with a hand, and a sudden wind swept upon us from nowhere, making the airskiff bounce madly and the ships creak upon their skyhooks. “Go away now. Godspeed.”

Captain Sharpe cleared her throat. “My, uh, my money?”

“Oh. Entirely forgot. Uninteresting representational currency.” She unhooked a heavy bag from her belt and threw it to the other woman.

Captain Sharpe snatched it from the air, gestured to her pirates, and they beat a swift retreat back to their ship.

My father reached for me again and . . . and . . . I cannot even begin to tell you what I thought or how I felt at the moment. Rage, yes, and resentment, and a good deal of fear, but above all, the bleak, empty purity of despair. Of having no choices left but one.

I knocked Lord Wolfram’s hand away, rolled to my feet, and dashed to the edge of the ship.

I didn’t hesitate.

I jumped.

The last thing I heard was my father’s scream.

And the strange woman, whose only comment was: “Intriguing.”

I can’t remember how it felt to fall. I don’t think I thought anything or remembered anything—my life certainly didn’t flash before my eyes. It was just this moment, Dil, this moment of absolute abandon. Of freedom.

And then I stopped.

Caught on nothing but air and the swirling currents of aether.

I suppose it should have felt precarious, but it didn’t. It felt strong and oddly safe, like being held in the arms of a lover.

And then, I was moving again, rushing upwards, the wind howling in my ears as I was pulled back to the Endeavour and dumped unceremoniously on the deck at my father’s feet.

I pushed myself to my hands and knees, ready to try again, to fight, to do anything rather than let him take me. And he stared down at me, unreachable behind his cold eyes.

“Thank you.” His voice cut over me and through me. “My son is a fool.”

But as he reached for me, the woman who had condemned me as she rescued me stepped between us, her skirts carrying with them the scent of aether and ash. “Your supposition is erroneous. This one is not for you. I will retain them.”

“Y-you can’t do that.” He sounded . . . uncertain. Lord Wolfram. My unwavering, unyielding, unforgiving father. “We had a deal.”

“The deal has changed. I’m done with you now.”

His hands curled into fists. “Do you know who I am?”

“Profound disinterest in knowing. Begone.”

Another of her quick gestures, and the storm darkened, crackled. Lord Wolfram staggered backwards as though she had struck him. She raised her hand, and he was lifted into the air, where he flailed for a moment, helpless as a ragdoll, and then she tossed him into the airskiff’s basket. A slice of her finger, the tether rope severed with a snap, and the balloon was snatched out of sight by the wind.

The storm calmed.

“Much better.” She glided past me across the deck to her phlogiston barrels, her feet never once touching the ground.

“Please,” I tried. “He’s taken my friends. I have to go after them.”

She cast an impatient glance at me over her shoulder. “How?”

She was right. I had no ship. No means of obtaining one. “Can you help me?”

“No. Too busy with science.” She pulled a notebook out of the pocket of her dress, and began scribbling in it with the stub of a pencil.

I watched her for a while, but she seemed to have forgotten I was there. She was a short, spare woman, who moved with energy rather than grace, her age impossible to judge. She had a mass of patchwork hair—honey blonde, and mousey brown, streaked heavily with grey—folded awkwardly into a bun, and the sort of heavy-browed, square-jawed, hook-nosed face that gets politely described as handsome. But there was something familiar about her too. I was sure I’d seen her before, not necessarily in person but . . . somewhere. “Who are you?”

She tucked her notebook away. “Miranda Lovelace.”

That was when I recognised her. Peter Lovelace’s book—On the Operations and Applications of Aetheric Dynamics—had been in Lord Wolfram’s library, though I confess I hadn’t read it. His disgrace, and then his tragic demise (along with his wife) in an ill-conceived experiment, had been in all the papers. “But . . . but you’re dead.”

She gave me a look. “Provably false.”

“Why did you stop me?”

“Have proposition. I take you beyond the sky to the aurora to see what happens. Then you may go.”

Had I been thinking clearly, I would have wanted to know what was likely to happen. Instead, I asked, “Will you give me a ship?”

“If successful, you will not need one.”

“Um, and if it isn’t successful?”

“Then you still will not need one.”

I thought about it for a moment, but what other options were open to me? If I said no, I was still stranded on the remains of a research vessel in a city built on a dead monster in an aetherstorm. I . . . ah . . . hesitate to deploy improper language, but I was fucked, Dil. Utterly and completely. “Have you done this before?”

She nodded. “Twice.”

“And . . . what happened?”

“Casualties: near total.”

This was clearly a suicide mission. And, believe me, while it is one thing to hurl yourself off a kraken in a moment of profound personal anguish, it is quite another to let a presumed-dead lady scientist sweep you off to face unimaginable horrors beyond the skies. “I don’t mean to be rude, but isn’t doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different outcomes the very definition of madness?”

“So I have heard. But, if correctly adjusted for external variables, also the scientific method.”

I came slowly to my feet. “All right.”

I had thought preparations would be required, but no. A shudder ran through what was left of the Endeavour, and to my consternation, it began to move. I braced myself against the crumbling deck as the ship pulled free of the kraken in a shower of wood and metal and flaking crystals. It was a wonder it was still holding together, let alone capable of flight, but then I realised its engines were silent, and all I could feel was the shift and thrum of aether.

“How can you do this?” I asked, as the storm ebbed around us.

Her brows dipped into a frown. “Question still under investigation.”

I’m afraid I remember very little of the journey. I can vaguely recall watching the horizon swallow the greenish-purple haze that was Liberty. And I know we flew far faster than I would have believed possible, even for a fully intact airship. Higher too, through the stratosphere and beyond. It was cold, at first, shockingly cold—and there was very little shelter left upon the Endeavour. I crouched, shivering, in the broken prow, the freezing air biting at my skin, sinking deep. I would have thought so much cold might be numbing, but it simply hurt.

Miranda, hovering a few inches above the deck, her skirts flying around her as she scribbled in her little notebook, barely seemed to notice.

The sky brightened, and for a while it was warmer. But then it turned cold again. And colder still. I sank into the slow white spaces of my body. It was hard to remember where I was, or why I was. Fragments, not quite memories, not quite thoughts, kept catching at the edges of my consciousness. But I couldn’t make sense of them.

The curling roofs of Canton.

My father’s too-pale eyes.

The peach-sweet scent of osmanthus flowers.

The earnest benevolence of Ruben Crowe.

Edward’s crooked smile.

The flashing moments of my fall.

And then they were with me. Lady Wolfram holding out her blood-stained rose. Whore’s get. Claverslick with his switch. Gentlemen do not cry. Rosamund tugging at her braid. I don’t need to ask you anything. The fall of Lord Wolfram’s shadow. You are my son.

My son, my son.

Leave me alone, I wanted to say. Leave me alone.

But, of course, they weren’t really there at all.

I’d long since stopped shaking. Couldn’t breathe. My heart beat an uncertain rhythm in my chest. I wasn’t even sure I was cold anymore. My head was full of splinters. My vision fading dark.

Miranda, I thought, was real—though far away, as if looking at me down a long, long tunnel. “Note to self: remember breathing apparatus for higher altitudes.”

I thought I was going to die.

Maybe I did.

I don’t know.

But I opened my eyes, and I saw stars—a sea of stars—not like you see them from Earth or the deck of an airship, with their light already dimmed and their distance unbreachable, but naked in their incalculable multitudes, spread across the universe in a thick, silvery crust. I stretched out my arms, almost thinking I would be able to touch them—they were so close, Dil, so present, the weight of them and their deep, heavy sparkle. And from the spaces between broke colour, oh such colour, green and purple and pink and blue and gold, fresh-made in shades brighter and purer than my memory can encompass. Arcing unbroken across the limitless vault of the universe.

Infinity. I beheld infinity.

Nowhere and everywhere, the beginning and the end of all things, boundless and impossibly vast.

And beautiful.

It was beautiful.

I gave myself to the spaces between the stars, to the colours that lay beyond the edge of the world, to endless eternity. Like a bride, like a lover, like a child.

And the universe took me and claimed me, and when I came back, I was changed.

I could . . . I could see. And feel it inside me. I was.

The aether and the stars. The immensity of space and time.

I looked at Miranda, and they were in her too.

She glanced up from her notebook. “As I thought: intriguing.”

“I have to help my friends.”

“Come back soon. Experiments I would like to run.”

Once again, I leapt from the Endeavour, and this time I didn’t fall.

I was part of the aether now, and I moved through the air like a ripple in water. I felt Liberty as I passed it, a twisted knot of power and madness, but I didn’t stop until I was above the sea. I . . . hovered, I suppose, the wind catching in my hair, and the salt spray burning my lips. Without instruments, I didn’t know where I was, but the thought didn’t trouble me.

The truth was, I wasn’t lost at all. Not when the sky was waiting for me.

I climbed, and there at the edge of the grey-blue horizon, I saw familiar sails. My father’s ship, the Victoria.

I swooped towards her across the waves, both shocked and exhilarated by how quickly I could move. How natural it felt. As though I had been waiting my whole life to fly.

I caught up in a matter of minutes, alighting on the quarterdeck to a chorus of screams and a rattle of gunfire.

I still don’t know the extent of my capabilities, the depth of the changes the aether has wrought within me, and I have never since been able to draw on such reserves of force and aggression, but not a single bullet touched me. I don’t recall moving, or stopping them, or even consciously being aware of them, but somehow wherever they were, I wasn’t: the aether shifting with me, and around them, until they splashed harmlessly into the sea. Nothing but bits of metal, stripped of power.

I glanced at the sailors’ faces, and I realised they were . . . they were terrified of me.

The truth was, I hadn’t really planned to take the ship by force—I hadn’t really planned at all—but perhaps there had never been another choice.

Lord Wolfram had drawn his sword. I don’t know if it was habit, or if he really meant to run me through. I suppose I looked monstrous. Wild-haired, aether-eyed, my clothes tattered, dripping icy water.

“Stand down, Father.” I held up my hands, not in surrender, but in conciliation. “I’ve only come for Captain Rackham and his crew.”

I’m not sure he heard or cared enough to listen. “What has that madwoman done to you?”

“Nothing,” I told him.

He moved. Or I thought he did. I only meant to keep him away from me, but there was too much sorrow in me, too much silence and frustration and pain, and everything I felt surged over the ship like a tempest. Shook the sails and the rigging. Struck my father hard. Lifted him into the air and sent him tumbling over and over, until he crashed into the mainmast. It was . . . an undignified fall, his sword skittering away across the deck, but I was relieved to have injured his pride more than his body.

I have never been able to derive pleasure, nor any sense of my own power, from violence. Undoubtedly there are those who would call this weakness.

Lord Wolfram shook his head dazedly and pulled himself to his feet, only for his leg to buckle under him and bring him to the ground once more. The look he gave me, as he crouched there . . . I will never forget the scorn in his eyes.

There is part of me that questions it still. How . . . how could he call me his son, and hate me so?

“And this is your gratitude,” he said, “for all I have given you.”

“All you have ever given me is shame.”

“You deserve no more. Your intractable perversity disgraces my blood, my name, and my country.” He pulled himself to one knee, braced against the mast. “You are nothing. Nothing but a half-English, half-man freak.”

And in that moment I hated him back.

I wanted to hurt him for all the times he’d hurt me. For all the hurts he wouldn’t even recognise. But more than anything I didn’t want him to have something that was precious and beautiful and valuable to me.

Unthinking, I went to my knees. Put my hands to the deck. Let the aether flow through me.

Changed the Victoria as it had changed me.

Into who we were always meant to be.

Together.

I couldn’t tell you what I did. It was all instinct—instinct and passion and love. I ran my heart through her rigging, let my soul shiver in her sails, felt her body like it was my own, wood and metal and canvas and skin, the two of us made one.

Made free.

I opened my eyes and the guns were gone, the deck was flush, her lines as clean and pure as I always knew they were meant to be. And she lifted from the water as effortlessly as I moved myself, cutting through the air with the same grace and swiftness as she did the waves.

It had not been a rough transformation—no more than mine beneath the stars—but most of the crew leapt into the sea the moment the ship took flight, and the rest soon followed. Had any remained, I would have gladly offered them safe passage, but I suppose my strange appearance and my behaviour would not have inclined anyone to trust in my mercy. All the same, I did not want to cause them harm, so I released the jolly boats and lowered them down carefully. I could see the brown blur of England’s coastline in the distance—perhaps a day’s journey away. I think most of them must have made it safely home, at least by some of the sensational newspaper headlines that immediately followed. Ship Attacked by Wild Flying Aetherbeast, and such like.

Lord Wolfram was still clutching the mast.

I’m sure he would have spoken to me, but I was done listening to him.

“Good-bye, Father,” was all I said.

And then I cast him overboard with the others.

As I rushed to rescue the crew of the Valiant, I saw the figurehead—which had been Britannia, gold gilded with sword and shield—was gone. In her place was a horse with a curling mane and eyes full of stars. And that was when I knew the Victoria was gone.

That she was Shadowless now.

Mine.

It was quite a reunion. I had become startling even to those who already knew me. But not to Edward, who drew me into his arms, as though everything was the same as it had ever been.

“I knew you’d come.”

I took Shadowless after the Revenge to reclaim the Valiant. It took me less than half a day to track them from Liberty, and it was barely a conflict, for which—still uncertain on what I could do, or how likely I was to hurt someone—I was grateful. It appeared no ship could outrun me, no bullet could hit me, no fall could hurt me.

When I had subdued the Revenge, there were many amongst the Valiant’s crew who wanted to turn them in to the authorities. But I would not allow it. I . . . I disregarded the vote—I broke the code, the one I had made my own the day I signed my chosen name to the ship’s articles—and none dared challenge me.

I did it because I believed I was right and because I had the power to.

Such a dangerous thing. I knew that, even as I did it. But I also knew—perhaps had known ever since I took my father’s ship—I would never again be a member of someone else’s crew.

I lost some friendships that day. Betrayed a trust.

And Captain Sharpe—catching me just before I left the Revenge—was the only one to ask me why.

“For your equity,” I told her, smiling a little.

Edward forgave me. He was my first love. Of course he did.

We travelled together a little while, Shadowless sailing at the side of the Valiant, but the day came that we parted ways. I had too much to learn. About myself, about Shadowless, about the aether.

About the power I had, and what it meant for me.

It did not feel like leaving. Miranda gave me to the stars, but it was Edward who first taught me how to fly.

And that’s . . . that’s my story. Or, the beginning of it, anyway. Sorry . . . I . . . It . . . doesn’t really have an ending.

I suppose because it’s still happening.

The sun slid away long ago. Dil is silvered now and silent, his legs wrapped around Byron Kae, holding them close and tight. His breath is warm against the side of their neck, as he leans in and whispers, “Thank you.”

Byron Kae feels the blush creeping hot across their cheeks. They want to say something awkwardly self-deprecating like It was nothing or It doesn’t matter, but it wasn’t nothing, and it does matter.

And Dil understands.

“Hey.” He nuzzles softly against Byron Kae’s neck. “Got a question.”

“Anything.”

He looks up, and the starlight is in his smile. “You ever get that dance?”

They shake their head.

“Mebbe you could have it now. With me?”

“Yes.”

And that’s all it takes for Dil to slither off Shadowless’s rail, straight into Byron Kae’s arms. There’s a moment when their bodies lie flush, Dil all supple heat and lean muscle, sharp places and soft, promises of strength and yielding. He gives a little wriggle—purely, knowingly wanton—and then his feet find the deck, leaving Byron Kae dizzy, breathless, and aflame.

They stand like that a moment, certain and uncertain, dancers on the brink.

Dil’s eyes are shiny black, the moon caught in them. His hands come to rest lightly against Byron Kae’s waist, and even through a velvet coat, a corset, and a silk shirt, they’re half-convinced they can feel the imprint of those clever, acquisitive fingers against their skin.

“So—” Dil’s feet shuffle a little clumsily, his boot catching the toe of Byron Kae’s “—do you actually know how to dance?”

“Oh, I was taught but . . . I haven’t really . . . I don’t think I remember . . .”

Dil grins. “Well, aren’t we a pair of numpties? But it don’t matter. Cos truth is, I got sommat what’s yours I need to give back anyhow.”

Byron Kae can’t think of anything. They’re about to say so, when Dil leans in so close they can’t quite catch their breath, or slow their heart, let alone line up sensible words to utter.

“’Tis this.”

And Dil kisses them, sweet and greedy, opening their mouth like a treasure box until all Byron Kae’s secrets come tumbling out in heat and helpless gasps. But it doesn’t feel like loss with Dil to want them, claim them, and keep them safe. His hands are everywhere and eager, and his tongue is swift and sly and wicked. His kisses taste of all his smiles.

“Oh, oh, Dil,” is all they can manage when he pulls away.

He slides against Byron Kae’s body, shameless as a cat, seeking ways to kiss again with hands and skin and the nudging of his hips, the pressure of his thighs, the urgent heat that blooms—hardens—between them. He gets his face against their neck, and breathes the scent of their hair, moans so desirously that Byron Kae feels quite ludicrously beautiful, treasured, wanted.

It leaves them dizzy, weak and strong and full of light. Full of their own wantings. For Dil, for this, and the things two bodies and two hearts can do together.

Suddenly Dil clutches on tight and gasps. “Holy shit in a box.”

The sky is all around them. The deck a long way down.

“I . . . I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . . We can—”

But Dil shakes his head. “I ain’t scared of falling. I ain’t scared of any fucking thing at all—when I’m with you.” He steps back, not wary at all, full of trust, held by nothing but aether and Byron Kae. Spreads his arms and laughs. “Fuck dancing, eh?”

They watch him, smiling, possessed by his joy, his freedom, his brazen hungers.

This love of wild places that still feels like home.

Byron Kae’s rainbow coat catches on the main topgallant yard. Flutters there like a new flag. Dil’s trousers land . . . somewhere. His shirt likewise. The sea takes his smallclothes, his boots, his belt. Byron Kae’s sashes and ribbons and petticoats are lost to the wind.

Dil beckons them into an embrace as tender and as carnal as the first. Skytouched and starlit, they fall into each other, into nothing, and fly.

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Glitterland

Glitterland: Aftermath (Free download)

Sand and Ruin and Gold

Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator series

Iron & Velvet

Shadows & Dreams

Prosperity series

Prosperity

There Will Be Phlogiston

Coming soon

Waiting for the Flood (March 2015)

For Real (June 2015)

Pansies (September 2015)

Looking for Group (November 2015)

Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the twenty-first century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret.

He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune-teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.

He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth-century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car.

He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.

Website: quicunquevult.com

Twitter: @quicunquevult

Goodreads: goodreads.com/alexishall

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