Ravara puts her hand out as if to stop me, but I ignore her. I look up at the Novator Primus. At what remains of her.

Lady Tornella Oraylis’ face is streaked with blood from the jagged gouges across her cheeks and brow. Her lips are split and broken, her teeth cracked. Her third eye is concealed behind a strip of black silk, but her human eyes are gone altogether. Clawed out to leave empty, gory sockets. Lady Oraylis puts her empty hand to her face as if she senses me looking.

‘They turned on me,’ she says. ‘Mndara and Gehsk. Lura. Men and women I have known and loved for years. They cut my face and took my eyes.’

‘And your Navigator’s eye?’ Ravara says.

Oraylis’ hand moves up to rest where her third eye lies, beneath the bandana.

‘No,’ she says. Her mouth turns down at the corners. ‘They tried, but I stopped them. I had to use it to kill them. Mndara. Gehsk. Lura. I had to look upon what they were made of in order to unmake them. I had to stain my soul.’

‘Then you can still sail,’ Ravara says.

Oraylis’ hand drops away from her face. She breathes raggedly, and a moan escapes her lips. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t ask me to. Call for one of the others.’

‘The others are dead,’ Ravara says. ‘And I am not asking. Either you find us a path out of the Rift, or we all die. And I guarantee that will do more than stain your soul.’

Lady Oraylis lowers her head as if she is looking at her hands. ‘The ship is half-dead. The crew more than half. The tides of the Maledictum are unlike anything else. It is so vast. So full of hatred and horror, and my blood is in the water now. It knows me.’ Blood runs slowly from Oraylis’ nose. ‘You have no idea what it is like to try and read tides that you cannot see. To stare into a ceaseless darkness that stares right back. I will not survive it. We will not survive it.’

Ravara’s mouth narrows to a thin line, and her eyes turn flat, like dull metal. ‘Yes, we will,’ she says. ‘I have seen it in my dreams. All of us, standing under the light of the cardinal world’s sun.’

‘Including me?’ Oraylis asks.

‘Including you,’ Ravara says.

Oraylis shakes her head. ‘I cannot do it alone,’ she says.

I go to one knee before the throne, and reach out to the Novator Primus, closing my gauntleted hands around hers and tightening her grip on that aquila pendant. Oraylis flinches at the sudden contact.

‘You are not alone,’ I tell her. ‘I know it can feel that way when you are surrounded by darkness, but you are not alone. None of us are.’