Read Online City of Night by Michelle West - Free Book Online

of what lay in the Ice Wolf ’s hold; they had requested permission to dock, and it had been granted. But Terrick’s presence was required on the docks—if briefly—in order to obtain the manifests necessary to process the cargo. He had always wondered how the complicated processing of manifests—and the legal need for them—had been explained to the first Rendish ship to seek this port. He did not imagine it had been pleasant, and could not quite imagine that no blood had been shed in the process. But it had happened, and it hadn’t happened on his watch.
    He glanced at the windows, shuttered for the moment, and then rose, walking to his desk to retrieve the inkstand and well that he would refill many times before sunset’s arrival heralded the end of another day.
    Sunrise, on the other hand, had not yet begun this one, and until it did, he could not look past those closed shutters to see the back of the boy that Garroc had raised on foreign soil.
     
    Angel thought of water: in the bay and across brow and arms and chest, salt of sea and salt of sweat, things that had to be endured. In the planting season, when the cold made sweat seem distant until the work began, and in the harvest, when the heat made the height of day a time to seek refuge in shade and stillness, Angel had endured. But he had had, at that time, a mother, a father, and a roof over his head.
    Now, he had a ship in the distance. It was in no way home, although his father had come from its decks to Averalaan. He still couldn’t think of his father—or his mother—without thinking of death and loss, and on the long road here, sheltered at sun’s height by trees and the royal messenger service’s standing stables, he had thought only of this moment.
    But Terrick’s question had taken root in thought, and he couldn’t ignore it. If he survived, what happened then? What would Weyrdon ask of him, if he asked anything at all?
    What had he asked of his father?
    His father had never said. But his father, Angel thought, had died certain that, in the end, he had failed both his lord and his charge.
    My father was not a failure. Angel’s lips whitened slightly as he pressed them together, his neutral expression taking on a watchful, angry edge. He’d eaten, and he’d slept, and if he’d slept on the floor, there was still a roof over his head; he had the energy, now, for anger. He might not have it later, but it was better to spend it here, where it cost nothing.
    He could hear his father telling him just that.
    And he knew, as well, that he would never truly hear his father tell him anything again.
    He waited while the sun edged up the horizon, watching the Ice Wolf as she sat in the bay. Watching, just as quietly, when she began to move. The Port Authority guards were more prominent on the stretch of dock that had gathered those men whose job it was to catch mooring ropes and secure them; Angel had watched them for three days. They were not the friendliest of men, but they reserved their curt words for people who were too stupid to get out of the way, and they stayed just as long as it took them to secure gangplanks, before drifting toward another dock and another incoming ship.
    After they had left, men and women in the teal of the Port Authority would join their guards and they would meet the first few people to leave the ship; they would offer these strangers papers and ink—the latter usually carried by a younger person who was also dressed head to toe in teal—and the strangers would make some show of reading whatever it was they were expected to sign. Often it was a poor show, and in the cases of The Ten, most of the paperwork was dispensed with entirely.
    But the papers, the ink, and the guards, adorned every single dock, regardless of the flags flown by the ships, and there were no exceptions made: The Port Authority had its laws and anyone who made port here was expected to follow them.
    This much, Angel had observed over the long three