#The new Harbour upon the Starless Sea | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mbovettwrites-blog · 6 years

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blackbird - (heavily) revised first chapter

happy new year!!

Something about the thunder made Ingrid Piuma’s blood churn. It felt tangible to her, a writhing force trapped in between the earth and the clouds like an eel caught in the net of a trawler fishing the Sunning Gap. Thunder is beautiful, she decided. She liked the way it seemed to buzz along her bare arms as she stretched across an unmade bed, legs tangled in white sheets and the window above left open for the wind and the rain. It was summer in L’Agio, after all, and she would be stupid to keep the fresh air out.

The power it inspired was exhilarating. It was not like what she knew from the myriad of tunnels that stretches underneath her neighbourhood of Cuorren – the capital of L’Agio – where she went almost nightly to be bruised by Aziz. He instilled an artificial power in her, one that used glinting steel and tasted of split lips and broken skin. That was a power she had known her entire life. It coiled in her like a desert snake, packed with venom and prone to lashing out at inconvenient times. Thunder tasted of the sea mists and the salt of Cuorren’s harbours, of the green mountains crowning foreign nations in the far north of the continent and the hint of ice from the wilderness beyond them. When power was natural, it sang to her dull heart and made it come alive. When it was human, it jarred and jolted her, like rounds of ammunition being emptied into her hollow chest.

Am I hollow?

She didn’t like to question that. It made her feel wrong inside, like she was made of nuts and bolts rather than bone and breath. Inhuman. Ingrid was still human, even if at the tender age of seventeen she had killed more men than she could care to count. That was what Aziz trained her for in the cold chambers beneath Paradisostrada. She laughed aloud to herself at the street’s name every time she saw it written down. The residents of the paradise street did not know what darkness they harboured under their feet.

The thunder drummed against her room again and she rolled over, turning her back to the clouds that had gathered outside. No moonlight broke through to illuminate her, but still she could see the mark carved into the back of her left hand, dark and obscene as a squatting toad. It curled around like the outstretched claw of a cat, frayed at the edges and cleaved down the centre by a web-thin silver scratch.

A feather. A fractured, spiralling feather.

It was the same for the older of her two sisters, who each slept in equally unkempt beds on opposite sides of the room. Sirena Piuma was twenty-two and still didn’t have her own room in the house, but what she did have was a shattered feather stretching from her wrist to the centre of her middle finger, on the same hand as Ingrid. Their mother’s crossed diagonally and their father’s was drawn across his knuckles. There were others in the family, but they were all the same hand. They were all the brands of murderers and thieves. It marked Ingrid as the thing she used to fear the most – the bringer of death.

Ingrid looked up at the small bed tucked against the left wall, where a girl with a head of ebony curls slumbered with her back to her.

Nicia Piuma was fourteen and would be tattooed soon enough. Ingrid feared for what would become of her sister afterwards – would she be taught to walk in shadows like Sirena or made to fire shots and wield knives like herself? Would Don Niloz, their father, use the same methods of discipline that he so frequently used on the other thick-skinned thugs who frequented the Cuorren tunnels?

The thought of it made her want to retch. She never wanted to imagine Nicia engraved with the same scars that she forever hid from daylight. That was not a future she would wish on any living being.

She almost didn’t notice the front door to the house swing open and shut again. An electrifying thrum of thunder sounded over it, but the door was closed with such force that it rattled every wall of the house. Nicia turned in her sleep, too dreary to register the pounding footsteps and voices laced with the sharp sting of rage. Ingrid did. She tensed on instinct, pressing as far into the mattress as she could and stretching her branded hand towards the nightstand and the knife tucked into one of its drawers.

They did not have to be dulled by alcohol or drugs to be dangerous. Don Niloz would take any level of hatred out on his daughters, if he could.

Ingrid knew that Sirena, in the tidy bed against the right wall, was awake too. She was a light sleeper, easily roused by the slightest disturbance in the house. A fly buzzing past her ear could wake her and have her fight-ready in seconds. She couldn’t see her sister, but she knew she was there, and she wondered if she would hear her quickened breaths if she turned her focus away from the downstairs commotion.

Something shattered – an ornament knocked onto the kitchen floor, most likely – and was followed by a string of muffled curses. A male voice. Not Aziz – Ingrid knew her mentor’s voice and his work pattern. He would not conduct his gruesome business in as violent a thunderstorm as the one battering the city that night. Konstantin, then. Or Alejandro. Certainly one of Don Niloz’s favourites, or else they would not be able to get into the house.

Soon enough, the commotion drew someone in the room across the hall out onto the landing. They had light steps and made little impact on the scene, and Ingrid deduced that it must be Kimita, a thief training under the guidance of her mother, Luna Piuma. The other apprentices sharing that room were not as nimble as her.

She heard louder movement in the room below her as both Don Niloz and Luna charged out to meet the men downstairs. They would not be pleased, and they would shout more and wake a frightened Nicia, as they always did when such intrusions occur. Ingrid had heard it many times before. People came back from failed ‘errands’ in the dead of night and expelled their anger on each other, and then her parents interfered and the tension escalated. Sometimes it was violent. Sometimes it was worse.

Kimita tapped the door and Ingrid turned her head like an owl to check with Sirena, whose small nod could barely be seen in the starless shadows. She undid herself from the sheets and stood as softly as she could, barely pausing to enjoy the fresh wind from the window as she crossed the large room to let their friend in. It felt strange to call Kimita a friend. She was not a friend. Not really. Ingrid didn’t have friends left in the world. Kimita was a stranger across the hall who she could laugh with some days and spill blood from on others. The only strings she had were attached to her sisters, and even they did not always reciprocate her loyalty. But she did not let her apathy show as she opened the door to Kimita’s strong, slender figure, silhouetted against the harsh ceiling light like a cat. They smiled against the chaos, and Kimita breezed past her into the blank room behind.

There wasn’t even a click as Ingrid gently shut the door, not wanting the other apprentices to enter. She remained against the wall there – Kimita had claimed her bed, a dragonfly poised at the edge of a fabric precipice. Still Sirena was motionless and Nicia slept restlessly. She would wake soon, and Ingrid prepared what she will say to comfort her, and how she could deflect Sirena’s disapproving glares. Sirena never cushioned Ingrid from their miserable world and she had not done so for Nicia, but Ingrid couldn’t bring herself to leave the small girl to her own devices whilst their father brewed a storm of his own downstairs. If they were fortunate, he would drag the intruders into the tunnels and deal justice down there, where Nicia couldn’t hear them choke on their mistakes.

“How do you plan to get rid of the Fierros?” Kimita asked. There was no hesitance to her words; only a morbid curiosity. Ingrid wondered what Niloz and Luna had done to them to make them all so indifferent to killing. She was aware of it, but decided long ago it could never be explained.

She cared no more than Kimita did, and answered just as plainly. “Knife them as they sleep. Get out the usual way. Same old same old.”

“You’re sloppy,” Sirena drawled from beneath her plump duvet. “A poison is far cleaner. You can make it look like a natural death, if you do it right. You show me a cop who sees a slashed throat and calls it death by natural causes, and I show you someone who should be killed for the sake of preserving the intelligence of humanity.”

An impressive roll of thunder drowned out Kimita’s hushed response, but Ingrid was sure that it could only have been a build upon Sirena’s half-joke. She would rather listen to the storm than anything else anyways. The commotion downstairs was not of as much interest to her as it was to Kimita – who must have been intrigued by it, or else she would not have disturbed the heiresses – and talk of murder and theft is all she ever heard. Instead, she ignored them, and faced Nicia instead.

If ever she could be trained into having the guts for it, Ingrid supposed that Nicia would make a decent sort of spy for the organisation (these days, she hesitated to call the Piumas and their associates a family). She was soft-featured and unassuming, crafted like a painted doll, and far too adept at keeping secrets. Like all of the Piumas, she was just dark-skinned and dark-haired enough to pass as an ordinary person anywhere south of L’Agio and north of Ghafelmah – in other words, the Gulf Belt. The nations on the Western Continent which bordered the Sunning Gap. L’Agio, Ygar, Ghafelmah, Navarios, Hamalo… the Piumas had hooks on all of those places. Though any one of them would obviously pass as native to their own corner of the world, Nicia had the advantage of knowing far more about being ordinary rather than just looking it. She was, after all, the only sister not to have been home-schooled by Luna or one of their many aunts. Ingrid had never been told why.

Ingrid had also never understood just why she cared for Nicia the way she did. There were others younger than herself in the family. Luna’s sister, Sofia Piuma, had three children – a daughter the same age as Sirena, and two sons younger even than Nicia. Yet Ingrid had never felt the same protective tug inside her when she was around them. Perhaps it was because they were cousins rather than brothers. Perhaps it something else entirely, a mystery which would elude her until her final days.

The way things were going, those days could easily come sooner than she had ever imagined – or wished.

A few months back, at the start of the spring, Don Niloz had been forced to break a deal with a rival ‘clan’ in the city before they’d gotten their fair share of the benefits, and they had unsurprisingly interpreted the act as the Piumas scamming them. Since then, the violence had only escalated. Kimita’s first mentor, a lock-picker named Priscilla, had been dragged from her home a few streets away from Paradisostrada and beaten to death. Her body had been found by police in the nearest canal, with a garland of yellow daisies tightened around her neck.

That had been an insult aimed at the Piuma daughters in particular. More specifically, Ingrid, though Priscilla’s murderers would have no way of knowing that. But they certainly hadn’t been oblivious to the fact that one of the younger members of the organisation would be most offended by it.

It referenced Ingrid’s clumsiest kill, a story that had unwittingly woven itself into urban legend. She had made the deadly mistake of being seen, though by some form of a miracle the witness had only been able to recall seeing a young girl by the water’s edge. The superstitious in the city had started to believe that a siren haunted Cuorren’s waterways, the paranoid blamed a vengeful spirit that had come to haunt the capital’s richest, and the sceptical saw it for what it was. A wayward human, perfectly mortal and perfectly capable of being brought to justice, if ever she was caught.

A fight must have broken out downstairs, for something or someone fell into a wall with such force that the entire house shook. Only now did Nicia sit upright in her bed, waist-length hair tumbling around her in all directions. Ingrid was the only one who moved to sit with her.

She rubbed circles against her back, never speaking and expecting no words in return. The shouting had frightened her little sister into silence. For a brief moment, Sirena’s unwelcome wisdom rang true. It wouldn’t do for Nicia to stay this way for much longer. On her fifteenth birthday, she would be tattooed, and then there would be nothing more that Ingrid or Sirena or Luna could do to stop Don Niloz from dragging her into their cruel world. Nicia would not be able to remain sheltered for many months longer.

Yet Ingrid knew she wouldn’t be the one to break down the walls that she and her mother had so carefully built around their youngest girl. Whatever humanity was left in her stopped her from so much as raising her voice against Nicia, let alone raising a fist, or something worse.

A knife. A handgun. A chain.

The walls shook again, and Nicia leaned into her. Kimita rose from her roost on Ingrid’s bed and crept across to the door, pressing her ear against the sliver of a gap between it and the wall.

“Your father just yelled something about you,” she commented nonchalantly.

Sirena’s brow furrowed. “Which one of us?”

“Ingrid.”

Before she could even open her mouth to answer, she felt Nicia grip her arm tightly.

“Whatever it is, you mustn’t get involved,” she pleaded, her eyes reflecting nothing. “Father’s in a temper, he won’t be kind to you. Don’t do anything for him tonight. Please.”

“He hasn’t come up to ask anything of me,” she answered softly. “Believe me, I have no intention of sticking my nose in his business without invitation. That would be more reckless than I have the guts to be.”

“It would be completely stupid, even by your standards,” Sirena retorted, stretching out and kicking her duvet off of the bed. “Kimi, what’s he saying?”

Kimita paused before she answered. “He says that if they can’t get rid of her before Ingrid finds her, he’ll just dispose of them and finish the job himself.”

“For the love of the gods!” Sirena hissed. “Who is he talking about? What job? Oh, get out the way, let me listen.”

She jumped across the room with far less grace than Kimita and pulled her aside, pressing herself against the door instead. But Ingrid wouldn’t listen to any more. Her. Niloz was talking about her. What did he want with her? How did he know about her? How long? How many days had he spent hunting her down?

Was that what he had been so angry with her about before? Had he seen them together? How much had he seen? What did Don Niloz, scourge of the southern paradise, know about that girl?

She stood up abruptly, Nicia watching her go with water in her eyes. Yet she didn’t question Ingrid. She knew better than that.

Instead, she did as Ingrid and Sirena each did – she turned back to her bed, nestling down into the cotton sheets in spite of the humidity. Comfort was of greater value than cool air. Sirena would not trouble herself with Ingrid and Niloz’s affairs if she wasn’t required to, and Nicia would make herself ill if she worried too long and too hard. As soon as the sisters fell into silence, Kimita let herself out, clear on the fact that Ingrid’s involvement in whatever was going on downstairs was her cue to get out and leave them be.

Ingrid left the window - and her eyes - wide open. She had vowed weeks ago not to let memories of her old friend conquer her thoughts, but if Niloz had been hunting for her, she couldn’t sit around and let her get caught, no matter what bitter note they had left things on.

The thunder rolled again, and Ingrid forced her eyes to close at last, not daring to think any longer of Nadira Scandaris and what had become of her.

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