“Very well,” Isabelle said. “But this doesn’t get you out of reading lessons.”

Rebecca rolled her pupilless eyes. “No miracle’s that big.”

Which meant the only honor Isabelle might save via capitulation was her own, if slinking off to commit political suicide could be considered honorable. If Djordji was right—and he’d been doing this longer than she’d been alive—Sireen was giving her a chance, one more shot at the dice, and leaving up to her as to where to place the bet.

She’d put her last token on Jean-Claude.

CHAPTER

Nineteen

There was never a time and nary a place on a ship that was not busy. Things had to be moved from port to starboard and starboard to port. Anything that wasn’t painted needed to be painted, and anything that was painted needed to be stripped of paint. Even the manger where Jean-Claude was being held was not free from intrusion. The animals were kept just forward of the gun deck, and though the spaces were separated by a bulkhead, aeronauts kept circulating through on their way to somewhere else.

Some hours earlier, a flat-eyed gang of aeronauts had come by and fed the chickens, milked the cow, and scraped out the pens. One beast keeper even put down a ship’s biscuit and a wooden mug of water for Jean-Claude, all without saying a word.

Travers’s aeronauts were exceptionally quiet. There was none of the boisterousness he expected from sailors, no laughter, no arguments, and none of the singing that kept the men in both good spirits and steady rhythm while they worked.

Le Comte Travers didn’t want his men in good spirits. He didn’t want them in any spirits at all. Likely his whole crew had been born and raised in his county, and broken down until there was nothing but a blank page onto which Travers could scrawl his own pathetic screed. They weren’t quite bloodhollows, but they had been starved of all imagination and ambition. Travers reserved such qualities for himself and then wasted them by his contempt.

Travers was, in his own sick way, even worse than Isabelle’s late unlamented father. Le Comte des Zephyrs had cared only that his subjects feared him and fed him, but had otherwise taken no interest in their lives. Travers, conversely, wanted to control every aspect of his subjects’ lives, to deprive them of hope and will in the interest of perfecting them.

Jean-Claude finally popped the padlock holding his collar. He threw off the shackles and rubbed his abraded neck. His battered arm throbbed, and his left eye felt as if someone had stuffed his eye socket with an iron thistle, but he was past the first hurdle.