She hangs the coat over the rail to continue its dripping unaided, making certain it is secure enough that it won’t fall.
“Who’s gone?” Dorian starts to ask but only gets out the who before choking on honey again. The woman hands him a flask and when he puts it to his lips the water is better than anything he has ever tasted.
The woman looks at him in a pitying way and hands him another towel.
“Thank you,” he says, trading the flask for the cloth, the thanks sticky-sweet on his lips.
“The owls are gone,” the woman says. “They came to investig
ate the commotion. They like to know when things change.”
She walks away across the deck, leaving Dorian to collect himself. Strings of glowing lanterns loop around and up the mast, over sails the color of red wine. The lights continue along the railing like fireflies, going to a higher level by the bow, where there is a carved figurehead of a rabbit, its ears running back along the sides of the ship.
Dorian takes long, deep breaths. Each one less sweet than the last. So, not dead yet. His shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore. He looks down at his bare chest and arms, certain he should have some residual injuries, some scrapes and scratches at least, but there is nothing.
Well, not quite nothing.
On his chest, over his breastbone, is a tattoo of a sword. A scimitar-style sword with a curved blade. Its hilt is impossibly gold, metallic ink shimmering beneath his skin.
Breathing is suddenly difficult again and Dorian pulls himself to his feet. He steadies himself against the rail and looks out at the Starless Sea. Pieces of the model universe sink slowly into the honey. A single golden hand points desperately upward, disappearing as he watches. The cavern extends into the shadows, the sea softly glowing. In the distance shadows are moving, fluttering like wings.
The honey drips from his hair and his trousers, pooling around his bare feet. He steps out of it, the deck warm beneath his toes.
He walks toward the bow of the ship, following where the woman he assumes is its captain has gone.
He finds her sitting beside something covered in silk that matches the sails laid out on the deck.
“Oh,” he says when he realizes what it is.
It is difficult for him to process everything he feels, looking at Allegra’s body.
“Did you know her?” the captain asks.
“Yes,” Dorian answers. He does not add that he has known this woman for half of his life, that she was the closest thing to a mother he ever had, that he loved her and hated her in equal measure, that moments ago he would have killed her with his own hands and yet standing here now he feels a loss the depths of which he cannot explain. He feels untethered. He feels lost. He feels free.
“What was her name?” the captain asks.
“Her name was Allegra,” Dorian says, realizing now that he doesn’t know if it was her real name.
“We called her the painter,” the captain says. “Her hair was different then,” she adds, gently touching one of Allegra’s silver locks.
“You knew her?”
“She let me play with her paints sometimes when I was a rabbit. I was never very good.”
“When you were what?”
“I used to be a rabbit. I’m not anymore. I don’t need to be. It’s never too late to change what you are, it took me a long time to figure that out.”
“What’s your name?” Dorian asks, though he knows already. There cannot be many former rabbits in such places.
The captain frowns at him. It is clearly not a question she has been asked in some time and she pauses, considering it.
“They used to call me Eleanor, up there,” she says. “It’s not my name.”
Dorian stares at her. She’s not old enough to be Mirabel’s mother. Not nearly, she might even be younger than Mirabel. But she looks like her, the eyes and the shape of her face. He wonders how time works down here.
“What’s your name?” Eleanor asks.