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CHAPTER FIFTEEN good. now you're ready.
WEEKS LATER, MERCY REFUSED TO so much as look at Alina Starkov.
She hid behind feeble walls and named them hurt and betrayal and sadness because selfishness felt far less righteous than she would have liked. Because it was - selfish that is - and in the way that a compass needle always point north, Mercy Fahey will always point to herself.
If Alina Starkov has decided to die, Mercy decided she wouldn't be the one to pay the price.
Because she always was the one to suffer. That was the thing about everyone else dying around her and dropping like stones into the deep blue, they were never the one to bathe in the grief that followed. For her, it was like being perched atop a quiet mountain, only realising the world is burning when you smell the smoke. The world is gone. And now you're alone. On a mountain. And Saints, isn't it lonely?
This time, Mercy decided, she wouldn't smell the smoke. How could she, if there was nothing there to burn?
So she stepped back from the Sun Summoner. Her life became a quiet amalgam of honing her skills and rebuilding the Hummingbird on the shore of a lake with too few tools and far too much time to create anything but perfection. Life became a sort of moment-to-moment thing, buried within the crevices between planks of fabrikator metal, hidden in the cloth of the sail.
Mercy hoped they'd get to use this ship once at least, before the Darkling killed them all.
It was Nikolai's idea to 'take a break'. A diplomats approach to calming the fuck down, Mercy supposed. She'd protested, loudly. He'd protested her protests, louder. His birthday was only days away, he'd reminded, which somehow meant that his word usurped the divine and Mercy lost the fight - as well as her only source of distraction.
Then it was Aarav's idea to train with the grisha, the two had conspired against her it seemed, and now Mercy faced the rather meagre task of remembering how to wield her body when she couldn't rely on the chaos of the sea nor the singing of the metals. And it was that, the simple act of remembering how to kill, that let the Pirate slide back into the clawed hold of what came before.
There was a time, before Sun Summoners and amplifiers and Privateers with prominent chins, that Mercy's life depended on keeping the things that went bump in the night as far away as possible. Her old Captain, the dead one, the one who's name stopped being important years ago, brought her onboard the Immaculata for his protection but that didn't mean he would ensure her's. And so Mercy had to learn.
Somethings are never truly forgotten.
But instead of lessons with the quiet Suli assassin under the cloak of stormy nights, this time, training came in the form of a rather strange Shu man, with choppy Ravkan and a captivating assortment of anecdotes.
