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CHAPTER FOURTEEN there's courage in letting yourself fall, when you've only ever longed to fly
IT HAD BEEN MONTHS NOW and Mercy was sure: there was something rotting in the heart of Ravka.
She felt it, leeching into her bones like a violent whisper, as if she'd flung the windows open on a stormy night and all the darkness in the world had settled into bed beside her.
Autumn melted into spring, spring blossomed into summer and yet there was something so utterly wrong with the way the seasons wove their steady course, something on the tip of her tongue, corrupted.
On the Immaculata, the changing of the seasons was a blessing. Above all else, it meant an end to the relentlessly bitter nights that would endeavour to steal a finger or toe or ear or tongue from some unfortunate sailor, leaving Mercy with a crew that was unsymmetrical on the better of days.
It also meant storms. Brutish, maddening, liberating storms that would empty the skies and unleash the seas and flush the aquatic veins of the earth. It would pervert the very nature of the world - the water that rushed below them falling from above - as the little familiarity one could hope to find on the waves slowly disappeared from the sight of waterlogged eyes.
So Mercy knew perplexing, she knew the way the world could change and shift and reform in an instant. She thought she knew more than most.
But, if the recent months had taught her anything, it was that she really knew nothing at all.
Here, in Ravka, there was nothing as perverse as the change in seasons. The blistering days would bled into stifling nights and where the hatred for grisha blossomed, the need for their gifts would bloom. And so, the Squallers would summon a cooling breeze and the Tidemakers would strain the humidity from the air and Mercy would wonder when her fate became the norm and not the exception. Grisha were not made to be slaves.
Her rage was quiet but visceral as it sat atop her brow and weighed heavy on her shoulders and Mercy had to wonder when exactly she began to feel a hundred years older and if the years would ever recoil because it was exhausting to feel all this anger.
Luckily for the inhabitants of Os Alta, the youngest Prince had just the solution.
Well, he had several solutions, one too crude to voice aloud lest the maids take it upon themselves to start a rumour and another rooted more in the practicalities of life in the Ravkan capital.
Nikolai had proposed the idea on a humid summer night by the lakeside, when a heatwave had shattered the will of the people more effectively than the Darkling ever could. Rebuilding the Hummingbird, with her help, because wasn't she a Fabrikator?
Mercy had agreed without a second thought because truly, there was no greater remedy to her desire to maim than to keep as busy as humanly possible. Building a warship felt like a good place to start.
